Exercise 4: Collating and binding

Reflect, evaluate and rework
Having printed your images from the previous exercise, take the opportunity to view all of the pages, reflect on them and evaluate before moving on to the next step of collating and binding the pages together. Which pages are successful? Which pages have not turned out as well as you had hoped? Are there any visual surprises, or happy accidents? Given the experimental and open-ended nature of this exercise, the answers may be quite subjective, but it is important you reflect on these and other questions, to sharpen your self-critical awareness and assessment of your own progress.

You may want to re-work some of the images, and the printing process, and this is your opportunity to do that. You may end up with more and more pieces of printed paper.

Select and collate
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in your work and then begin a process of selecting up to 16 pages that work well together as a whole. Do these pages have images on each side of the page, or will the images appear on facing pages only? If you want to create back-to-back images you can work manually to cut and paste images and pages, using spray mount or similar. Equally, you can collage elements of printed ephemera onto and into the pages. Again, the brief is to be experimental, so work inventively with the process, cutting, gluing, pasting and arranging as you see fit. Collate these pages, putting them into a running order from beginning to end.

My original printouts had worked as a two-sided spread that could be folded into a pocket size. I liked the expansive and flowing quality it produced. I thought this could now be an opportunity to try a fresh approach – my idea being that there would now be 3 double-sided spreads that could each be folded and produce 12 pages. This would mean creating four more images to make up my booklet (more on these extra pages in a bit). I also wanted try different sizings, opting for A5 spreads that would fold to A6 pages.

I was happy with the existing image selection but needed to make some tweaks which I will explain in a bit. I found it useful to create a mockup to visualise where images would sit in relation to each other.

Below are my edited designs:

The front cover is much the same. The image next to it is page 4 rather than the back cover. It sits next to the front cover because rather than each spread sitting inside of each other, they sit on top of each other. To fill the extra four pages I opted to use the photographs I had used in my designs. They serve to strengthen the imagery and add space between the narrative.

An obvious issue I encountered by changing the page sizing was that my previous images ended up being too small. Rather than playing around with an arrangement and composition I felt happy with, I copied and enlarged the backdrop photographs to serve as page backgrounds. This now means the original image remains transitional while the pages are clearly defined. I thought this created an interesting effect and is quite different from my original approach.

This is another extra image I added. This time I used one of my own photographs to reflect some of the agrarian vibes in my design.

I have applied similar treatment to this spread as I did with the previous narrative spread. Another change I made was to copy the gears over onto the right hand page to increase the cohesion in the spread.

And for this spread I added some stock images of cows. It definitely adds an extra layer of absurdism and acts as a climax of the poem’s intensity.

A minor alteration to the left side image. I overlaid cow patterns over the face to create more harmony with the front cover.

Binding
Drawing on your understanding of bookbinding so far, bind your 16 pages into a small book format. How will the pages be held together? Consider how the pages might be bound and experiment with solutions. Will you create a cover? Will the pages be stitched, sewn, glued, stapled or will you use another inventive approach?

There are many ways to bind a book, either by hand or by machine. A few examples of bookbinding are saddle stitch, Japanese binding, coptic binding or perfect binding. Consider which binding is most appropriate for your book. There are some good tutorials online of bookbinding and this might be useful for you to have a look at. Try to use one of the bookbinding techniques mentioned above for your own book.

Document the whole process, photograph the book and incorporate them into your learning log, accompanied by supporting work, including pages and images you chose not to include into the final book form.

When printing my designs I first tried using the kraft paper I had used in previous exercises. It muted the colours and did give it an antiquated look that I quite liked. However, I wanted bolder colours for this printout. I ended up using a photo paper instead which created more striking visuals.

I went back to my bookbinding kit and did a saddle stitch which I had previously practised with. I used a white colour to blend with the typography. I thought a saddle stitch provided a charming homemade look to the booklet.

Reflection

I’m quite happy with how this turned out. I would make a few alterations however as follows:

• I somehow managed to mix up the two yellow spreads. The order when opening should be: field, tins, crown, tins. Admittedly this is big mistake that changes the sequencing but one that can be easily rectified with another printout.
• Using a thicker and more glossy paper. I think this would bring the images out even more and make the booklet more durable.
• Try a hardcover. This seemed a bit superfluous for a tiny 12 page booklet but it would be interesting to try out.

Overall this exercise felt like a coda to the previous exercise but it was very beneficial to approach the design from a different angle and make alterations to make it work more efficiently. It’s also good to sharpen my binding skills.