Book Construction

For gaining ideas of how to go about creating my books there were really two options, either send my pages off to get printed professionally or print the book myself. As I have said previously, I rather like the look of comics that go against the professional look of the mainstream comics, and I also like the appearance of something that looks like it has taken time and effort into making. After looking at what facilities were available to me, I took the decision that I wanted to make the the books myself. The question I then asked myself was in what way would I choose to make it myself.

 The first thing I took into consideration was what size they were going to be. Usual mainstream comics are around about 9.5 inches by 6.5 inches, so the first thing that came to me was do I stay the same size, or do I go bigger or smaller? I knew that I wanted my books to look different to the regular comics, so I tried out different sizes, along side different materials as well.

The first experiment I tried was to go smaller, this was to try out what it would look like as a little booklet type comic. I also tried using quite flimsy card and bound the pages together with staples. Looking at the end result of this experiment, I realised that not only was the size too small, but the flimsy card just didn't fit my vision of what I wanted the books to look like.  

For my second experiment, I decided to increase the size of the book to A4 size. I also tried using a rougher card for the cover, and used separate sheets of Ripple Embossed white card for the inside pages. I bound the book using the university's professional book binder, which uses a special glue to hold the pages of the book to the cover. Whilst I liked the feel of the texture of the card on the pages, and the binding process to hold everything together, I found I wasn't that fond of the rough card for the cover. I also didn't think the card would cope well with the printing process. I decided to try and find a smoother, yet still strong type of card for the cover.

 
In the end, I found a sturdy yet smoother type of cream that felt perfect for the outer cover. I felt suitable for the printing process for when I wanted to print the out cover, and was even suitable if I felt like I wanted to do inside sleeve artwork.