October 22 2024
I actually spent the first week of brainstorming and concept development planning this booklet as a children’s activity book. My moodboard caputred the feeling I wanted to embody: whimsical, cute, simple, etc.
This is the early and rough stage of my planning process. I love using Procreate with page assist because it lets me quickly flip through my sketches.
This was a test to see how the materials looked when they were enlarged/seeing how good quality the scanner was before I invested time illustrating the booklet.
October 28 2024
I realized that I was not passionate about this assignment and my progress so far. I was dissapointed that I chose to get an early start on the project before I was fully invested in my idea and explored my options. I believe it was necessary to restart to prevent an unsuccessful result.
I was struggling with the illustration and designing the booklet for children. It is important to do and make resources for them, it just wasn’t making me excited at the moment. I thought I should make a magazine/zine for adults about similar topics to prevent having to completely restart. And it is a topic I'm interested in.
October 29 2024
I looked into Vancouver Island Tourism, the BC Government, and the Immigrant Welcome Centre for documents/resources that would serve a similar purpose to the booklet, but I wasn’t able to find much. I’ve concluded that there is a gap for an easily accesssible resource of information about Vancouver Island.
October 29 2024
I started to put images and text into layouts in indesign for an early-stage rough draft. I kept them unfinished because I could move onto the next page and keep the visual theme consistent. Above is a rough idea for the preface of the booklet. I planned to adjust it but I liked the natural and nautical feeling. I picked the typeface Aesthet Nova for the titles because I think it resembles a font used a lot for the Island. The title font used for Vancouver Island Tourism is custom-made for desination B.C. which isn’t accessible to me. I was able to use the some body typeface, which was chosen because of it’s “modern appeal and compatible counterbalance to Great Forest. Its function is to provide legibility for consuming larger blocks of text, but it is also a beautiful alternative in its all-cap form for subheads or lead-in copy blocks.“
October 30 2024
I printed some different options for text size/columns and decided on the higlighted options. I was going to do two columns per page but I think the 5.5 by 8.5 page size can only comfortably fit one column. I also was going to do asymmetrical margins but at this size I would really prefer to work with half inch margins to allow for more room in the page. I tested the fonts in print because it can look much different than how it does on the screen. Testing this way lets me choose the option that the most people would be able to easily read.
November 2 2024
I was trying to put all of the regions of the island on one spread, but it felt really cramped and hard to explain the region in 2 sentences. I think my solution so far is to use a half page for each area which is equal to 4 spreads. The book was slowly getting larger at this point, but it’s still relatively a small amount of pages. I planned on doing the book with staple binding to save material and labour costs if the book stayed within a comfortable size where it wouldn’t look weird with a staple bind. I was thinking of using a collage type of layout with text to get a layout of the region.
November 3 2024
I realized that this cute little map to demonstrate the regions is innaccurate, at least innaccurate according to Vancouver Island Tourism. I had to redo it after making these ones.
November 6 2024
At this point I had written the copy for 22/24 pages. I had the resource page and a page about public ransportation. After researching, I think public transportation varies too much between cities to be able to write specfic information about it.
November 7 2024
I didn’t leave myself enough time to print. I had almost every computer/printer problem that could happen, but it got done. I’m happy with the final result but if I were to do it again I think I would add more variety to the regions of the island becasue it does get a little repetitive.