PAUL KUHN

Wot Is A Book?

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Theend

It has been such a great semester! I got to find out about a lot of new different artist and design projects through lectures, workshop, group project and individual research. 

Our main project was creating a book with the concept of Post Digital, which meant it could be interpreted into many different possibilities. I think it was a very interesting and thought provoking concept, it let us really think outside the box and explore new and different objectives.  I was able to look through many different artists as inspirations and received many helpful research of techniques and design. I liked that we had this project the whole semester, so there was a lot of time to have trial and error, which I did a lot. 

We also had a group project that we had to do, where my group was involve in curating an exhibition of previous students work of the same concept. I think it was a great experience for the group and a great learning tool for the future. We had a lot of ups and downs and hopefully will be able to finish up the installation by the end of this month!

The online Tumblr journal again was a great source. I was able to see others research and notes as well as, seeing what and how other people in class are thinking towards their designs process is really interesting and lets you learn as well on how to perceive different things. It is also a great place for me to post my process, research, inspirations, lectures etc for me to be able to acknowledge the things I have done and what expand my interest and have learned throughout the semester.

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WOT IS A BOOK?  EXHIBITION | GROUP PROJECT

WHAT DID YOU DISCOVER?

I think working in a team itself was quite a challenge for myself, especially since the project in designing a space was fairly abstract. Designing an idea for a window display with a large group of people was quite hard, as some people had made their voices heard louder than others, which created some tension within the group.

Nevertheless since it was a long process and that we met each other on a weekly basis, we got to know each other more and having each person and myself learn to not talk over people and let everyone have a voice, we all learned to work well as a team and was able to share any thoughts we had and was able to somewhat give each member a task to do.

In terms of curating the exhibition itself I think we all learned a lot in creating a 3D model, concept drawing, research, communicating and more. We discovered that it was really easy to go off track within the time, keeping same design as a team was a challenge, how we needed to be more flexible if something is not the way we wanted it to be and being more organize as a group and with the librarian.

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After finishing the book it was interesting to see the research I had and the collection of youtube and the final book itself being compared to one another.

On the left side are instruction booklets the makeup one is a vintage how to guide same with the 2nd row its a dance guide, while the last one is a relatively new Apple TV setup booklet. the middle one were the youtube page of the tutorials and the left are the final outcome of my book project. 

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FINAL BOOK PROJECT Youtube Tutorials An anthology Paul Kuhn Book Eco Paper 14.8cm x 21cm First Edition/50 Pages I was really happy with the final outcome of my final Book. I think it followed the concept of Post Digital pretty well of transcribing youtube tutorial into a novel like book. 

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BOOK PROGRESS | 8

During the last week I was able to finalize the book, by fixing all the little things and adding those final touches. Unfortunately the printers messed up the printing, as it was all over the place, which was a big drain because they then could only finish it on Friday the day its due. However looking at the wrong prints I was able to see how the paper works and how the whole thing looks as a perfect bound book, which i was actually happy with. 

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BOOK PROGRESS | 7

Picking out titles for the Book.

I was drawn to having it ‘short tutorials’, as for me it resemblance like book of ‘short stories’ and thats the vibe/concept of the layout of the book, that its just a bunch of short stories/instruction/tutorials into one book. After asking people around I decided on ‘Short Tutorials an Anthology’. I think it brings the whole thing together and theres a funny contrast with the serious title and majority of the context of the book. 

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WEEK 12 | LAST CLASS In todays class we worked on both our personal project and the group project.

For our group project all of us had their on task to do. Alexa and I was creating the ai. files for the title to be printed in vinyl. We both had to figure out the measurements we wanted to have and to fit it within the restrained of the vinyl size and printer. We found the biggest and the best size for the type set. Hopefully it will work out fine, when Andy prints it out.  For my personal project I printed out a rough prototype of the book. I had feedback from Andy and some of my peers, which helped me to go forward with my final book. I just have to wake up my life and finish the book and print out the final asap. 

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How to Choose a Font for a Book Design

The best fonts for books are usually unobtrusive serif or sans serif fonts. Follow best practices to ensure a visually appealing design for your book.

BOOK TYPOGRAPHY RESEARCH 

Some research I had on which typography is good for book design, as I have not really made a novel/reading type books in a while. 

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BOOK PROGRESS | 6

After finalizing the concept of how I will put together the youtube transcripts, which was to keep it simple, like a plain reading novel book. So from previous research on novels I put together all the content and experiment with different typeset, Chapter placement, paragraph set and also title names. 

I took the time to really test out different font that would suit it, and also the placement of chapter title and overall text, so that the book will be easily read, because some of the content is hard to read due to the way the Youtuber spoke. 

I printed it out as a book to see how it will be overall, and i really liked how it came out. From the feedback with Andy and some peers I decided to have the chapter title on top of each paragraph and to keep everything else really minimal. Also the final book wont be in the bleach white paper, I wanted it to be more soft going towards cream color.

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Layout for posters / catalogue so far.

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Week Eleven - group work

Today we met outside of class to discuss the front display and talk about the posters and the website. Andy printed out some photos of the exhibition windows and we cut and paste some different typefaces to test out sizes and styles.

I then did a rough sketch with a white gel pen of the typeface we have decided works best. It is a black letter, but simpler, longer and more narrow than the previous one.

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The start of my hand modeling career! 

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WEEK 11

In todays class we focused on the group project and some personal work as well.  We started off with answering and discussing a worksheet that Andy gave about our final project to help us creating our rationale of the final work. The worksheet helped us think about or project in depth and how were able to describe our project. 

For the exhibition we had to reshoot the images of the students work, as the ones we did first had a lot of shadows. (I think we still need to take photos of the content of book, not sure.) We also discuss the website and was shown some of the layouts that some of the people in the group did. Andy liked some of the ideas and said will create the html and have us add the images, artist statements etc. We decided to meet up during the week in smaller group to discuss the design for exhibition and other things.  For my personal project i was still kind of stuck of which direction to go to, after discussing with Chiara, I m going to stick with the variety of different tutorials and make it into a novel like book, as it suits with the Post digital concept of how people use to get simple instruction booklets but now go to youtube with interesting different ways.  Having same genre tutorial might be a bit boring and following a specific youtuber visual life into text doesn't really suit the post digital concept as strong, and seems more like a different project concept. 

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Web design

Group project

As the artworks are too tiny to display, our group and Andy suggested making a website with QR codes for the exhibition. Lulu and I are responsible for web designing. We had a meeting last week, discussing how we want to design the website. We both agreed to keep the web design as simple as we can because we only know the basic knowledge of Dreamweaver. We will make a homepage and individual pages for each book. These are some layout we made:

After consulting with Andy, he liked the layout on the bottom left and suggested us making a mobile version for that. He also mentioned that we needed not to make a website as he wanted us to focus more on the exhibition. Therefore, all we need to do now is to create a mobile layout and email him a pdf file.

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BOOK CLUB

Does Not Love by James Tadd Adcox. I stumble upon this book a few years a go when i was in the states and I was drawn to it mostly because of firstly the cover caught my eye within the pile of half off section. The story itself didn't really interest me, however reading peoples good reviews towards the story, kinda makes me want to, but never really had a chance, maybe this holiday. With that however when I flick through the book, I really appreciated the design and layout of the whole book. I thought the graphic was pretty unique, the color scheme of it had a nice touch, the book block placement and design I thought was really interesting, and how the lines show through the spine of the book brought a lot depth into the book.  The book ended up being somewhat my inspiration for my final Book project. Since I was going for hat novel like book, it was a good inspiration, trying to follow the text typography, size, spacing and overall look for my final book design. 

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WEEK 11 | MOOD MET MUSEUM, NYC, 2014

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BOOK PROGRESS | 5

Since I am going for a minimal novel/reading book, i played around with different typography thats usually seen in those type of books, and see which one would fit best. 

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BOOK RESEARCH Since I’m going towards a novel like type layout, I look through different books I had and see how the layout is, the typography and just in general how to mimic those novel-like books.