About a year ago, I started working with Rob Ford, the founder of
FWA, to get an FWA Annual published.
I've posted the page layout designs I did on my
flickr account.
Long story short, we never found a publisher, and the book remains a long lost dream for me (that will happen some day hopefully). I prepared a design explanation of my thoughts for Rob, for when he pitched to publishers the idea and design of the book. This was my explanation verbatim:
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Design Explanation
General Notes: * Only white, black, grays are used. Only the screenshots, wallpapers and the occasional SOTM, SOTD, PCA banner would be in color – like the site.
* Links are reversed out like selected items on the site – if your on the page, it’s like you’ve selected the item
* Interviews, wallpapers, and articles should be interspersed throughout the book to break up the monotony of all the site page layouts. They serve as visual rest for the eye and will help with pacing of the book.
Page Layout ExplainationPage 1-5: SOTM
Page 1 is a vellum sheet with the SOTM banner and some short copy as to why it was chosen as SOTM, that that overlays page 3, containing a screenshot of the website. Pages 4-5 contain the website description and various screenshots layed out in a grid. No page numbers exist, and black is used as the background color to enhance the importance of the SOTM, as most SOTD’s will be on white. This will help to break up the monotony of white bg pages.
Page 6-7: SOTD Full Spread
If there are sites which were exceptional SOTD’s, a full spread can be dedicated to them to show off more of the work. The page layout grid is flexible, so depending on the design of the website, the grid can best show off the different states of the website. Page numbers with chapter title appear on the outside lower part of pages for easy thumbing.
Page 8-9: SOTD
Most of the book will look something like this, with adjacent SOTDs. Again, the grid is flexible so the size and position of the descriptions and screenshots will vary. Pacing is very important in a collection book like this (all the content is basically the same) so varying the layout is important to keep things interesting. Page numbers with chapter titles (For Placement Only – FPO) appear on the outside lower part of pages for easy thumbing.
Page 10-11: Wallpaper
Full bleed wallpaper with URL of the artist and URL to download from FWA. The position of this can changed based on the design of the wallpaper.
Page 12-15: Interview
Page 12-13 is used for pull quotes (you do this for all your interviews). The full bleed black bg with the white copy centered serves to give the eye a rest from the all the screenshots – it helps with the visual pacing. A deliberate insertion of calm space. To further the rest from all the screenshots, no images are used on the interview spread (14-15), so there’s just text. The FWA URL to the article is at the header of the page.
Dock IdeaI’ve been thinking about how to incorporate the idea of the dock from the site, and how you can use it to basically bookmark a bunch of sites, articles, interviews, and wallpapers. So I thought it might be cool to have a page of stickers that people could peel off to and afix to the edge of pages to add something to a “dock.” The stickers could be color coordinated or just have labels on them, that they could use to wrap around a page or just hang off the edge like sticky notes. It might be expensive to produce, but I think it’s a pretty cool idea, especially if we’re talking about a 550 page collection book.
This idea really goes back to the original design goal of The design of the book should somehow reflect the dynamic nature of the site.
FinishesIt would be nice to do some spot varnishes or gloss to really bring out some of the screenshots or type. For example, putting a varnish over the screenshots in the Jumpman23.com would make the black site really pop off the black page.
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Labels: books, design, FWA
