Brief 1: Pure Imagination // Issues and more changes

Bella came over to Leeds to sort out some of the work and we had a long discussion about this publication. There were a couple of points which she wasn't happy with. Initially her idea of the book had been a very simple front with just text, like the image below.

Source: http://arthurfrank.bigcartel.com/product/if-you-leave-volume-iii-pre-order

This is what I originally had, but after the feedback from Phil Cleaver he quite rightly said that a blank cover does not entice or interest people to pick up a book as much as a book with a photograph on the front.

Naturally Bella had an idea of what she wanted when we first decided on the brief; she wanted it very simple and for the first few pages just to be text, however going to back to the feedback I got from Phil - the viewer will very quickly lose interest if the first three spreads were just simple text...this is a photography book so photographs need to be on the majority of the spreads.

We managed to compromise on this point and agreed that having photographs were needed to be on the introduction and contents page, but Bella wasn't too keen on the photographs which I had used for two of them and especially on the front cover.

Problem 1 - 'About The Photographer' Page

I had used this very striking photograph which Bella had taken three years previously. However the edition I had had been taken from Bella's blog page so the quality was very poor. Unfortunately the original file had been lost when Bella had to wipe her laptop a year ago, so because of this we were forced to find another image to use.

The first image I wanted to replace it with was another paint one from the same shoot Bella did a few years ago, because this I managed to find the original file for it. Although I think this photograph looks good, because it is in black and white I feel the impact of the photograph has been lost, and also the relevance of photograph as well.

This was another of the images that could be used. It was more relevant to the book because it was taken in a recent shoot specifically for the book.

We went through all the images on her laptop of the shoots she had done this year and in the end this photograph worked really well. It was for the Mike TV poem but she had decided to go with a different photograph.

Originally I placed the photograph on the left side but after filling around on photoshop trying to cut out the image and finding that points of the photograph were too fine to be cut out, I moved the image to the other side of the page and it now blends in well.

I also realised the the first few pages of text (about and contents pages) still had a black text box, so this also had to be changed.

I am very happy with the new layout. I loved the original photograph that was used, it was striking and caught everyones attention but