Try This at Home Report

HOME REFERENCE MANUAL tutors: Paul Luna, Ruth Blacksell, Ole Lund, Bryn Walls, Jeanne-Louise Moys Francesca Romano MA Book Design Department of Typography and Graphic Communications University of Reading 2012–13

HOME REFERENCE MANUAL tutors: Paul Luna, Ruth Blacksell, Ole Lund, Bryn Walls, Jeanne-Louise Moys The home reference manuals are books aimed at the general public, containing instructions or detailed informations about a specific topic.They usually contain a great number of illustrations and have complicated layouts, so they are very expensive to produce. They also require large groups of people to work on the same book: the writer, the art director, the designers, the photographers and they all have to collaborate to design the best possible book, which always involve having to go through a lot of compromises.

For this book we had to produce the content from scratch, text, photographs, illustrations... That is why we had to produce just a minimun of five pages, a so-called blad, that should show the main page types present in the book.

I chose to do a book about science experiments for kids, so I had to deal with more lively, funny and loose layouts, but also with matters of safety and the need to signal when parental assistance is needed in the experiments.

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Covers for the books I researched during my discovery phase.

From top left to bottom right: The Way Science Works by Jayne Parsons, Science Experiments

by Robert Winston, Cool Science Tricks by Daniel Tatarsky

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Discovery science experiments

by Robert Winston, Dorling Kindersley Publishing. · Format: 257 x 16 x 305 mm, large and tall. 144 pages. · Cover: plastic coated hardback. Many different pictures and patterns.

Unusual font, different from the ones used inside. · Introductory material: safety notice with explanation of the icons used in the book; author’s foreword about why he wrote the book with a remark on safety again · Sections: color coded, every page has a sideband so you can see the sections looking at the colours on the side of the book. very dull colours. · Layouts: dark patterned background, boxes with irregular borders and dull colours, old style illustrations and icons, step sequence not always clear. Shadowed stencil font for titles and sans-serif for texts. · Tone of the texts: short and simple texts. the way science works

by Jayne Parsons in collaboration with the Science Museum, Dorling Kindersley publishing. · Format: 218 x 11 x 274 mm, 160 pages. · Cover: plastic coated paperback. Title fonts made up by various photographs, background going from dark to rainbow colours. · Sections: colour coded, with coloured running heads on the spreads. · Layouts: much more theoretical text and just a box for the actual experiment, mostly white background, photographies and no illustrations, text paragraphs going around the photos, with not much white space. Mostly serif, seriouslooking fonts · Tone of the text: much longer texts and more emphasis on the theory cool science tricks: 50 fantastic feats for kids of all ages

by Daniel Tatarsky, Portico publisher · Format: 196 x 154 x 18 mm, 112 pages. Portrait format, very hard to keep open. · Cover: uncoated hardback, reproduces the same kind of illustrations that you can find in the book, but not very consistent in style. · Introductory material: short introduction on how science can be cool and a saftety notice explaining the icons signalling the experiment’s level of difficulty. · Layouts: just illustrations, various boxes with flat colours or decorated borders, white background or squared/striped. Difficulty of experiment not very evident and confused with other elements in the layout. Rounded bold sans serif for titles and introductory text, slab-serif for other texts. · Tone of the texts: longer and more complicated text, sometimes involving specific language.

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Interior page from Science Experiments by Robert Winston.

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Interior page from The Way wScience Works by Jayne Parsons

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Transformation format The majority of these books have a large format, to accommodate all the information regarding the experiments, but most of them have an old-fashioned, tall format and I decided to go for a more contained one, settling with the dimentions 210 x 280 mm (3:4 ratio) The book is going to be for kids of age seven to eleven years old and it is going to be used in the kitchen or outside the house to carry on potentially staining experiments, so it is going to be hardback with a plastic coated cover to be more resistent to use and staining.

I did not want it to be too thick so I have decided to feature 50 experiments (a spread for each) plus a short introduction and end matter. On the whole it is going to have 128 pages, and the inside paper will be coated and relatively thick. font Many kid’s books have quirky or slab-serif fonts, so I chose as my main type Caecilia LT Std because is a large and round slab-serif font. As a secondary font I used Frutiger at first, for the titles, for which it seemed ideal, since it had many weights. But in the end Gill Sans seemed a better choice for its quirky Ultra Bold, and Frutiger was judged to be too serious.

Caecilia LT Std Bold ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 Caecilia LT Std Heavy ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890

Fonts used in the book: different weights of Caecilia LT Std and Gill Sans MT. On the facing page: dummy showing the format of the book, the cover and the binding.

Gill Sans MT Bold ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 Gill Sans MT Ultra Bold ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890

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photography Photography was an important element in this project, and a real struggle for me. At first I wanted to have my photographies set in a kitchen, but the lightning was terrible and I had to retake them on a white background in the department.

This helped the overall layout as it took away the boxy feeling and gave more air to the page illustrations I started with designing the icons I had to use to point out the time required to do the experiment, the place it could be carried out and the need for adult assistance.

Then I decided to do some random illustrations to give the page some life and I ended up hand drawing half of the elements in the layout: the sideband patterns, the cover, the end paper and the background on the section separations, not to mention the lettering in the cover and for the section dividers. The cover, endpaper and section divider’s background are patterned with hand-traced scientific images: diagrams, drawings, schemes. The cover and endpaper have general images; the section dividers have images specific to the subject in question (see pag 14–15).

On facing page: transformation of the photographs in different shootings.

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Illustrations done for the book.

Not all of them have been used.

In this spread: icons and illustrations used to decorate the pages and the hand-traced title for the section divider.

On page 14–15: patterns for the cover background and end paper and for the section divider background.

On page 16–17: illustration for the cover and the diagram in the introductory section.

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Homemade crystals While crystals like diamonds or other jewels are extremely precious, you can grow your own crystals at home

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What you need sugar glass water food colouring scissors thread pencil

How does it work?

Crystals are solids formed by a regular pattern of molecules connecting together.

When sugar is dissolved, the molecules are separated in water and, as it evaporates, they fall naturally into their place in the geometric structure.

1 day

Material world

Material world

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1

Boil some water in a pan. Have an adult helping you in this step.

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Drop some food colouring in the water and stir it.

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Variations Add sugar until it doesn’t dissolve anymore and some of it remains on the bottom of the glass

ve tals ha the crys rical et a geom e! ap sh

Cott o be n w exp st for orks e th abs rimen is orb t as e ver y effi s wate it cien r tly

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Cut the thread. It must be longer than the depth of the glass, you can adjust it later.

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Tie the thread to a pencil.

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Immerse the thread in the water and leave it for at least a day.

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If you want your crystals to grow further, prepare another solution (steps 1 to 3) and reimmerse the thread again.

The form of the crystals vary depending on the substances they are made from.

At home you can also try to grow them from salt or baking soda, following the same process.

Can you spot the differences?

colours Selecting the colours and identifying good colour combinations have always been very tricky for me, so I decided to do something more systematic with the help of the Adobe application kuler. I selected the main colours for the four sections and then selected the colour scheme for the spreads I was designing, that ideally would instruct the colour usage in the whole section.

Base colours for the different sections in the book.

C: 0 M: 11 Y: 95 K: 9

C: 28 M: 100 Y: 0 K: 0

C: 100 M: 20 Y: 0 K: 9

C: 0 M: 67 Y: 100 K: 0

C: 91 M: 0 Y: 82 K: 0

Intro

Forces and Motion

Material World

Energies in action

Living Things

Material World spread

Living Things spread

Introduction spread

Colour schemes for the sections that include the spreads I designed

On the facing page: spreads showing the usage of the colour schemes in the different sections.

The base colours define the section, so more elements have to be in that colour, especially the sidebands and the backgound.

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Grid and main spaces in the page. The grey area is used for the title on the lefthand page and is left empty on the righthand page.

Settings for the drop shadow effect applied in the book’s process spreads.

The illustrations are drawn, scanned, then coloured with shapes in InDesign. The shape, is then offset a bit from the lineart.

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Making book object Format: 280 x 210 mm.

Cover: hardback (3 mm thick board), coated.

Pages: 128.

Inside paper: Munken’s G-Print 130 g/mm2. grid 12 columns, 6 rows but 3 main horizontal spaces (in blue in the illustration below) Margins of 10 mm top, 20 mm bottom, 15 mm inside, 20 mm outside in which not more than 15 mm are occupied by the sideband. paragraph styles Section/page titles: Gill Sans MT Ultra Bold 40/38 pt (sections titles must be hand drawn) Page intoduction: Caecilia LT Std Bold 18/24 pt Main text (ex. the black thext in the reference spread): Caecilia LT Std Bold 12/15 pt Text in the diagram: Caecilia LT Std Bold 20/22 pt Notes along the diagram: Caecilia LT Std Bold 16 pt one line text “What do you need” box title: Gill Sans MT Bold 19 pt one line text “What do you need” box text: Caecilia LT Std Regular 11/14 pt “How does it work” box title: Caecilia LT Std Heavy 21 pt one line of text “How does it work” box text: Caecilia LT Std Bold 11/15 pt “Variations” box title: Caecilia LT Std Heavy 21 pt one line of text “Variations” box text: Caecilia LT Std Bold 11/15 pt Step descriptions: Caecilia LT Std Bold 11/14 pt Notes on the process spreads: Caecilia LT Std Bold 10/13 pt Photographs Shoot on white background and natural lighting.

Crop closer to show details and to avoid showing hands where possible.

Photographs’ boxes: slanted at different angles (no more than 12°) so that they group together. Apply a “Drop Shadow” effect like in the window shown below.

Illustrations The illustrations have to be drawn 200% of the expected size, with a medium felt marker. They are to be scanned into 300 dpi. In Photoshop select only the lineart with transparent background and save a .psd file.

The colour has to be added roughly in InDesign with the pencil tool, following the lineart. Then the coloured shape has to be offset from the lineart a bit.

22 title page

material world

indice

indice

indice

crystals

Energies

Flat plan of the manual, illustrating the placement of the different sections in the book.

The spreads I have actually designed are highlighted in yellow.

legenda

intro

23 exp. method

forces and motion

Living things

cabbage