Booklet: Film 4

This week I developed my InDesign skills by creating a booklet designed for distribution during Film 4’s film festival. I was supplied with a booklet of information with instructions of which page the information must go on. I was also given photos of each film director to include on the corresponding page.

Before we began working on the booklet, we spent a day experimenting with page layouts and observing existing page layouts in magazines and newspapers. I create some interesting layouts using images, body text and quotations.

Moving onto the booklet, I first experimented with drawn layouts for the overall booklet, using small thumbnails to draw double page spreads next to each other to see how they would look as a theme.

I noticed some of the pages included substantially more text than others, and so I made more detailed designs of these pages in order to find a way to fit all of the text onto them. I wanted to find a way to fit the text on without having to alter the text size.

The page with the longest text was one with information about Alfred Hitchcock. I found that, while drawn layouts gave an idea of how I could place the text, experimenting on InDesign was the most useful was to grasp an idea of the volume of text and how much I could fit on one side of A5. I experimented with different numbers of columns and the placement of the title, image and subheadings. After much time spent experimenting, I decided on three columns of body text with the title in the top left corner and the image in the top right corner. There was so much text on this page that it had to run onto the next page for half a column, however I decided that this was okay as these two pages opened as a double page spread and the text intended for the following page only filled one column.

So that they could be printed in the correct format, everybody printed their booklets in the studio on the morning of the deadline. Upon printing my booklet, my title page was off centre and I discovered some issues with texts that I had not applied the left justify that I wanted on all of my text. Whilst repeatedly reviewing my booklet on screen, these mistakes were invisible to me. This proved to me the importance of leaving time before the deadline to print, review, and possibly make changes print again.

This was the booklet I handed in:

The left justify issues appeared on the Michelangelo Antonioni page and on the Francis Ford Coppola page. I adjusted these mistakes and the changes made can be seen below.

UPDATE: At this later stage in first year, I have learnt so much more about type detailing, paragraph styles, grid systems and layout, and so I have looked back over this project and redesigned the booklet.

I added the colour red to add some vibrance to the pages. I played around more with font size, image and layout, improving my type setting from the previous attempt. Coming back to this project it was just as frustrating as before, and I found it difficult to work on such a small scale with the volume of text that I was given. Every page looks packed with text which was inevitable, so I had to try to work with what I had. I didn’t want the pages to look the same, but of the same theme and I feel that I achieved this the second time around. I like the aesthetic of the black and white images with the red elements of the pages. I think that my second attempt is much more readable and shows more knowledge of type detailing than my first submission, showing development of my skills and knowledge throughout the year. I much prefer my updated attempt to my first one. I really think it demonstrates a further understanding of type and grid systems, as opposed to the first where I quite clearly was unsure and experimenting with the settings on indesign which I had never used before. I am proud of the progression of my abilities and look forward to seeing these progress further through university.