Final project of the semester!
“We are all trying to tell our story, our cosmology, our way of understanding the world, through our work.” ~ Mark Dion
Stole that quote from the assignment handout. I thought it was rather fitting though especially for what I chose to do for this final project.
So here we are finally at the end. The Premise for our final DIE assignment was to combine and use all the skills we have learned over this semester in photoshop and illustrator to create a small booklet to be publish at the Digital Output Center at ECU. The Booklet had to have a minimum of 12 pages plus a cover and we could make the content of the booklet whatever we wanted it to be.
Faced with endless possibilities I decided on something rather simple, my epic back packing tour across Europe from back in 2008. This was mainly because I had over 13,000 digital photos from that trip that I had yet to do anything with so why not take some of the best and turn it into a little booklet for class? The first week into the project however I was faced with doubts when I saw some of the other more creative subjects my peers had decided to do. As a last minute decision I was going to switch over to doing a booklet on historical fencing (another passion of mine) but decided against it on the advice of my instructor.
So I stuck with my original idea and came up with a simple design that focused on the layout and arrangement of some of my best photos from that trip. I titled the booklet “Europe in 16 Weeks” with each page documenting a different week on my trip in chronological order. Taking my instructors advice regarding text and needless graphics I decided to let the photos stand on there own with the only text being on the tittle page and a little “End” credit. By having no text that indicates where or when the image was taken I feel that viewing the booklet becomes a game of sorts where you have to figure out and guess at where each picture was taken. One of my peers described it as a mini adventure of sorts as you flip around and try to figure out where you are.
Overall it was rather neat to revisit all those photos I took back in Europe and pick out the best ones from each week. It’s been two years since that trip and now I finally have something I can show people when they come round to visit.
The finished booklet can be viewed in pdf form by clicking on the link below.
Map of Europe that I "live traced" in illustrator, re-coloured, and cropped.
To create the cover I took the image of a map of Europe to the left here and live traced it in adobe illustrator. Once traced I experimented with different colour pallets till I found one I like for the front of the cover. For the back I inverted the colours and flipped it to be a mirror image. I used the same image in gray scale to do the inside of the cover mirroring it on both sides.
Aside from that the bulk of the work was simply trying to figure out the best way to arrange the photos on each page into a decent layout that was interesting, but not to complicated to follow.
A lot of the images had to be significantly cropped to fit in the layout, so I’ve included a number of them below for you to browse at your lesure. They are not in chronological order.
Overall this was a fun project to work on that wasn’t as mind numbingly time consuming as the rest of been. It’s also nice to finally have something physical that documents my trip from that wonderful summer abroad.
*All photographs Are copyright to D. Devlin 
