OUGD504 - Layout

Layout:

When thinking about the layout for the gin book, I needed to keep in mind that the design was supposed to be sophisticated and clean but also representative of the brands and flavours. I had already planned how I was going to show the combinations as the rough sketches were seen in a previous blog post so I needed the beginning of the book with the information to compliment this design idea. 

When presenting the information about the gin I needed to use the shapes of the bottles in order for the combinations to make sense later on in the publication. I therefore mainly needed to decide on the best way to arrange the typography around the shapes of the bottles. The first attempt I made at this can be seen above. I decided it would be best to place all of the text on the inside of the bottles as this way there wouldn't be any focus taken away from the shape of the different gin bottles. This therefore would help later on for the combinations when the reader is trying to identify each gin using the shape of the bottles. This layout worked ok for most of the bottles however when I got to certain gins there was a slight issue with fitting the name of the gin horizontally across the bottle. This was due to the bottle being too thin and the name being too long. I therefore had to rethink the way in which I arranged the text inside of the bottle. The redesign can be seen in the screenshot below. 

In order to make the name of the gins which where to long for the shape of the bottles fit into the inside of them I decided the best thing to do would be to turn the writing on its side. This can be seen in the diagram of the Portobello Road gin. Once I had decided this was a good way to fit the writing into the bottles which had spacing issues I tried it out with the rest of the bottles.

Using the centre of the bottle as the baseline for the name of the gin and then fitting the description to the right hand side worked well with all of the bottles. The example using two of the bottles can be seen in the screenshot above. I think that it actually displayed the information in a more interesting way than just placing it all in horizontally. This therefore will help to make the information in the publication more aesthetically pleasing to the reader. 

When designing the part of the book which had the information about the tonics I once again had to bare in mind the way in which I was going to be representing the tonics in the section showing the combinations. I had already decided I wanted to do this by just using the colour so that the reader would have to refer to the flavour of tonic that goes with the certain colour. Therefore sticking to the theme of keeping the information to the right hand side I decided to arrange the information by displaying the name of the tonic at the bottom of the page with the description of the tonic above this. 

The final part of the book before the combination section was the section displaying the different fruits that are used in the combinations of gin drinks. As part of the content I was given the vectorised stamps of each fruit which I then arranged to spread across the page. This was how I planned on arranging the fruit for the combination section so that it will be visible through the cut out of the gin bottle. For this stage I added the name of each fruit so that if it was unclear the reader would know and could always refer back to this section if they were unsure further on in the book. 

The final section of the publication is the combination section. I had my design idea for this part planned out and created the beginning sections of the book with this section in mind. I used the outline of the bottle shape for the gin, the colour block for the tonic and then the page spread of the laid out fruit for the fruit section. When the book is printed, I will cut out the inside of the bottle and the white half of the tonic page. This therefore will create a layering affect to represent the different combinations, starting with the gin, then the tonic and then the fruit to finish the drink.  

The final layout of the book runs in the order as explained above. The gins in the information section are in a different order to the way that they are displayed in the combination section. I decided to do it like this as I thought that it would mean that the reader would have to pay close attention to the shapes of the bottles and it would therefore make the book slightly more interactive as they may have to refer back to the beginning to remember which bottle is which. This would also possibly allow for them to be more adventurous with their choice of gin as they might not just choose the bottle shape which they recognise.