#i'm thinking about all the compositions. the cool colour palettes we could have had

[antennatoheaven]

i don't care that there's a murderbot tv show in the works. it should have been animated instead

[jackwatters]

CHILDREN'S SONG BOOK DEVELOPMENT.

Starting off this assignment I already have the sort of songs I want in mind. All of these songs will be more geared towards being "Child Friendly" rather than specifically targeting children, just for more flexibility in terms of options. It makes this assignment a lot more fun.

SETTING UP THE INDESIGN DOCUMENT: - A5 size 1754 x 2480 px - 12 Pages

CHOICES:

Are We Getting Any Closer - Songs Ohia Why? It's a pretty mellow song about getting close to somebody.

Place to Be - Nick Drake Why? This song is more poem like than the previous, it's more suited to these sorts of books. I would've just filled the book with nick drake songs, but I think having a wide array of different styles and approaches keeps the book fresh.

Potato Knishes - Ryan Dorin Why? This is an extremely surreal song that's just fun to think about, and it's about as non-sensical as some actual children's songs. The song itself is really weird and awesome, inspired by dadaism it takes advantage of a completely uncanny visual style to make an impact. I want to include the scene from the music video into my image.

Underground - Tom Waits Why? It's another absurd song, but it's much more grounded. It paints a clear image into your mind, which will be quite easy to put into an actual image for the book itself.

V. UNIVERSE - The Microphones Why? It's a song that helps you grasp the universe's immense expanse, and it reads like a really sweet kids rhyme. The song itself is something else (super atmospheric and scary), I wouldn't play that song to children, but I would read it's lyrics out to children.

Visualizing Each Song:

General Visual Style: For general visual style I want to think about what would appeal to a kid. OR firstly, I should probably think about what wouldn't.

No: - Visually Complex Images (because children are more likely to attach themselves to simple, approachable characters made from simple shapes). - Gore/Violent Images (obviously) - Sharp Shapes (rounded shapes are more appealing)

Yes: - Animal Characters (people aren't interesting to children, animals are much more appealing via their cute/coolness). -Simple, Vibrant Colours (Keeping things simple and visually eye-catching will appeal the most to children). - Fantasy Imagery/Abstract Imagery (Not everything has to be grounded, kids aren't picking apart all the aspects of these images, so making them visually interesting over keeping them grounded is probably the best option). A design style I want to specifically evoke is that of Scott Benson:

^I love his appealing and simple style and think it would work well in a children's book. TITLE PAGE DESIGN: I've made sure to paint all of these images in photoshop (illustrator for the vector images) with A5 sized canvases to match the InDesign file.

Here's a thumbnail I drew for the Title Page (Front Cover). I want the words to look like they're coming out of the trumpet the cat is playing. In terms of colours I'm Thinking about using orange/blue/pink, an unusual pallet, but I think it will work. I don't want to use any sorts of greens unless I absolutely have to cause it'll clash poorly.

Here's the final image. I think this palette works quite well, so I might just roll with it for the rest of the designs.

I've made sure to keep this document multilayered, adding as many layers as I could just so I can control all the aspects of the image.

^ Something to point out about this background I painted in photoshop is that I specifically designed it so it had depth and also vaguely looked like a city, just foggy. It lifts up the image quite a bit, looking more dynamic.

These abstractions exist just to fill space. The composition needed something, and I remembered that a lot of jazz album covers from the 50s utilize abstract art. So I just borrowed that idea for my own composition.

^This being one example POTATO KNISHES DESIGN

Here's the thumbnail I drew for Potato Knishes. It's heavily inspired by the video for the song.

^A screen shot from the music video (and yes, when I said surreal, I meant it). I felt like moving towards a more realistic interpretation of the character would go over better with kids. The character depicted in both the music video and my design is called Little King John, and he's lonely, so I tried to capture that here.

^This is my final design, I feel like it will pop against a good background. I'm quite proud of this, it really depicts the character of the lonely little king with only potato knishes to keep him company, all captured within this one image. Not having to explain much through the song. I think I want to make these images like that, with characters who are apart of the images that represent the songs. It's much more fun that way, and it's visually interesting for kids. When I was a kid, I remember that a lot of my favourite picture books would be the ones which depict a scene without text, one that implies something, it sparks the imagination. Obviously I have to include text here, but I want to lean into sparking the imagination of the reader. UNDERGROUND DESIGN

^This design for Tom Waits' underground depicts a group of moles living underground playing poker while a cat person above listens to what's going on underground by using a cup to amplify the sound. The inspiration for this is Tom Waits' curiosity for moles, so I thought it would be fitting to have the image depict them.

This final design is quite good. It properly visualizes an interesting scene that compliments the song.

UNIVERSE DESIGN

^UNIVERSE is a very unusual song. It hasn't much strong imagery within the lyrics themselves, but I based this design on the feeling I get when experiencing the totality of the lyrics. The magical wonder of the universe specifically is definitely inspiriting, and when listening to the song I imagine myself on a field looking up into the sky at night taking in it's sheer size.

^I've changed the design quite a lot from the thumbnail/concept sketch. I wanted to mix up the character a bit, taking a dog instead of a cat (too many cats already). I've also aimed to make a face in the sky with the moon as an eye, reflecting that lyric in the song itself "Oh, Universe, I see your face looks just like mine!". This design specifically evokes fantastical themes, which I like a lot. It's a consistent theme currently, so yeah.

PLACE TO BE: VECTOR DESIGN #1

^ Vector Images are much more complex and difficult to pull off than the raster images I've been creating in Photoshop. For Place to Be I'm just going with a simplistic design.

Here I've utilized the Copy + Paste tool and the Reflect tool (O) to mirror the head shape for symmetry.

^This is my vector image. It's quite different, and it's hard to replicate the style I've been using in a vector image, so it's going to be a stylistic whiplash unfortunately, but it gets a idea across. A sad dog missing all the things he had, or a dog dreaming about the things he could have. Are We Getting Any Closer? VECTOR IMAGE #2

^Here I'm going for something Simplistic and easy to make. I'm running out of time. Since this is a song about getting closer to somebody, I am going to make that literal.

^This final design is simple, and gets an idea across.

MAKING THE INDESIGN BOOK

Numbered Pages:

^Just adding numbered pages to the document via the parent pages.

^All the songs are in including this contents page.

For the Title Page, I've researched this way of getting curved text. First, I make an invisible circle object, then I change the text tool to the "Type on a Path" tool which allows me to type on the curve on the circle.

^The raster image quality isn't great, I'll change that in the preferences.

^Changing the image quality.

^changing the colour of the pages. I might change them to a darker colour later.

^These are generally where I want the images to be in the compositions. I've also added some filler space where needed with the vector images with backdrop raster images.

^I've adjusted the parent pages with these pink borders I whipped up in photoshop. The frame really brings together a lot of the images and centers the eyes a bit more and fills a bit more space. I've also centered and lowered the size of the page numbers.

[somewhatofablog]

29/09/2023 - morning refresh

This morning, we had two sessions before we had our collaborative research workshop later that day. Since there's four small groups in our year group (only because there's so many of us lol), half of the groups were split up into two pairs. Which meant two groups would be in a class different to the other two groups. This just makes it easier for the tutors, I think.

I'm in group D, which meant I was in a class with other members of groups C and D. In this first hour session, our tutor went over the assessment framework for unit 5 and quickly went over what was expected of us when it came to creating the process book. Because unit 5 is such a short unit, I was already well aware of just how much time I'll need to spend on reviewing sessions, workshops, lecture notes and generally just starting on that process pdf.

Hence why this blog's been revived - I want to essentially almost blog daily on whatever it is I am working on for uni. So that when it comes to creating those process books, I can just come back to this blog and plop them straight into the books. My memory's also terrible, so I really need to stay on top of this whole documenting thing. Hopefully, I'll get used to this because sometimes it's weird writing up what happened and like, figuring out the writing style is a bit confusing at times. Anyways, I wrote some notes down as you can see above.

After quickly going through the assessment criteria, we all then joined up in pairs and basically criticised and analysed some of last year’s process books for this unit. We were all given A3 sheets that had about two pages from a 2nd year process book. We then had to look at it in depth and figure out why the presentation/composition/layout of the images and text worked well/didn’t work well and how these sheets could’ve been improved in our opinions. We had to consider colour palettes, font choice, compositions etc when criticising last years work. All four process books got the top grade (which is an A), yet they all presented their work in very different ways from each other. This portion of the session was useful for me in the sense that I can look at another person’s work and think ‘yeah, I could perhaps lay out my images like that too’. But it is hard to know how to properly present your work more clearly to others, when you’re more focused on trying to explain your experimentation processes and reflection to your peers and tutors(if that makes sense). Anyways, I know presentation is a weakness of mine and that’s definitely something I want to tackle this year within my work. I’ll have to play around with compositional layouts/designs and see what works well with certain projects etc.

The second half of the morning was spent taking pics of ourselves in colourful lights. I'm not actually sure why we took the pictures - I personally think we might use these photos for our next mini brief (can’t remember what it’s called lol). Other than that, was it to have a go at photography??? I’m not honestly too sure lmao.

The photography ‘studio’ was behind a screen/black curtains. Each table would go behind the screen and take photos. When it was our table’s turn, we got up and took photos of ourselves on someone’s phone, which was placed in a tripod (??? not sure if that’s what it’s called). We played with the HSI and CCT buttons on the LED lights and we got some cool colour combos out of it.

That was it for the morning. The afternoon was spent collaborating on our text analyses with each other, which I’ll write about in a separate post.