One thing that I had especially been looking forward to in my last year of study was that I had to create a publication / portfolio of my work over the past year which was to be submitted as part of the final assessment. I'm a perfectionist, I'm not ashamed to say. To be honest, I don't think I would be a true artist if I wasn't. And I also love books. A LOT. They're a slight obsession of mine so when the time came for me to make my own book.. well you can imagine that I was quite excited. There were so many options with what I could do; professionally bound, completely handmade, print it myself, get a printer to do it etc etc. I decided I wanted it to look as professional as I could, for a decent price (which wasn't the case in the end, but I'm still happy!) and also design it in a reasonably straight forward way.
One of the girls in my class, Rachel suggested this online book publishing place called Blurb that offers a few different sized books and the option of hard or soft covers, ImageWrap covers or ones with a dust jacket, so I was sure that I would find something that suited the kind of book I wanted to make.
Anyway. I got onto choosing what I wanted and then had to teach myself how to use Adobe InDesign which was just so much fun! Blurb has a plugin for InDesign which has templates made up of the book pages, as well as the front and back covers so that made things a lot easier.
Then it was just a matter of choosing exactly what photos I wanted in the publication which was also easy, but the near impossible part was figuring out how I wanted the whole thing set out. Obviously I got there in the end..
So this is the version that I've kept for myself (the expensive one!) and Whitecliffe up in Auckland have got a version that I printed myself, with a card cover and not-so-glossy pages.
I was pretty stoked when this arrived in the mail, to say the least, but now I just want another excuse to design another book. I think I need to do a wee coarse is graphic design to get it out of my system..
