I have been testing layouts for the Precious letter head, I want to keep it simple as the stock is going to be pink and gold so don't want to add too much information and make it too busy.
This is the layout that I am going to use for the final letterhead and then reduce it down for the compliment slips.
Along with the images that I have spent a good amount of time on I also needed to decide on a typeface to use that would work across the range, because I wanted to keep it consistent and also work with the illustrations. I thought that a sans serif typeface would work the best, these are a few different ones I tried out, I am going to apply them to each of the books and see what works best across them all.
I had doen the illustrations and lay out for the cookbook covers but I hadn't given any consideration yet to the stock that it would be printed on. I first printed out a black and white image and wrapped it around a book to get an idea of size and dimensions. The text was to large and too close to the edges of the front of the book when I first printed it so I went back to re-sized the text on the front and also decreased the size of the barcode and logo on the reverse. I tried the covers on white stock, a cream and grey card and off white sugar paper, I also tried the text in black and different shades of grey. The black text was too harsh on most of the stocks so I went with grey, dark enough that it could be clearly read over the images. The images also worked best on the off white sugar paper, the colours of the illustrations complimented best with the stock and it was also the right weight for a dust jacket and folded easily.
These are my 5 cookbooks that are complete and ready to print, I have kept the text minimal because these are just the dust jackets and I have proposed that the text would be written on the cover underneath. I have added a barcode and an isbn number and the Penguin logo. I am going to try printing them on different stocks and see how the the size of the text comes out.
We had our event over the weekend at Dock Street Market, the opening night was on the Friday where we had the live band the Crash Blossoms and then the shop was open for the rest of the weekend. We had Form and Writing and James Murphy as our guest designers, it was a really successful night, we had a lot of visitors, some that we knew and some new faces that we hadn't met before. It was also Form and Writings first event so it was a good platform for them to get themselves and their work known. It was great to get my new work out there that I had been working on this term, I explored a lot of knew print processes and it was good to talk to people about them and how I had produced the work.
I have started putting the illustrations together for the front of my cookbooks. I still need to do some more illustrations for the other books but this is an idea of the patterns I am going to use. I now also need to work on the text and layout, deciding on a typeface and the format of the books.
