The End Of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson:
This book abides by standard convention in the following qualities:
- Standard glue binding - common with mass produced books
- Standard large scale book paper stock - plasticy like thicker magazine stock
- Read front to back linearly, the spine is on the right hand side
- Matt finish cover
- Cover infolds
It breaks some conventions with the following qualities:
- No page numbers
- experimental structure of text to mirror David Carsons style of Graphic design
- Text on book spine is perpendicular when lying flat.
- Fold out pages
How Could it be Improved?
- Layout of Body text could be even more experimental, some pages reading horizontally eg.
- Make the book waterproof or make the cover out of surf board mesh - Carson was one of the worlds top surfers before he was a designer
- Variations in paper stock - mimicking the randomness of his design
- Small insert pages or very periodic pages of different sizes.
The Kite Runner:
This book is a standard novel and abides by all the normal conventions of a book. Since Carsons book is imaged based, there was a lot of room for experimentation, however with a novel, one of the most important factors is readability and legibility, therefore the inside pages couldn’t really be changed much.
How Could it be Improved?
- Bind the cover in kite material
- Japanese stab stitch binding to represent the kites string
- To represent the two boys in the story, one rich one poor, the type on the cover could be a fairly decadent serifed typeface and then a handwritten one to contrast it.
Its interesting to study the production of a fairly normal book, because by identifying the standard conventions they can then be changed up to create something more experimental and representative of the concept of the book. To further this idea even more, more experimental books and publications could be researched.
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