Concepts My uni project PDF book link

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cardiff_gareth

cardiff_gareth

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Gareth
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Hey,
Looking for some feedback with my uni project. The link takes you, hopefully, to my Google Drive where the PDF is. If you have Adobe Acrobat then when it opens, go to 'view' and select 'single page' as then you get the 'pages' as the book would be. Some double spreads of the book are meant to be read as a pair.

There is a forward and artist statement but it's all geared around authenticity of Cardiff Bay with once credible features of the docks now used just as scene setters and how money was spent on the new touristic destination and not on the local and displaced community.

Untitled folder – Google Drive

drive.google.com drive.google.com
 
Hi just had a look through your book and like it, I like the images, the mix of colour and black and white.

As for critic the only things I find odd is:
I get the use of columns for writing but there are a lot of words that have hyphens at the end because the word is too big for the column, this just looks odd and to me untidy, I find it disjointed to read.

Page 18, there is a blank white page and then a lovely portrait of the lady, is this intentional?
Again it seems odd in the way it looks and interrupts the flow of the book.

Page 21, the black and white image in the middle of the book, I guess the book is designed to lay flat?
It looks a little lost in the middle of the page compared to the other pages with images on both sides.

Hope everything goes well for your project.
 
Thanks for the feedback, be honest and brutal as we'll never learn and grow if people aren't and I'm more than happy for people to tell me as it is :)

Yeah those hyphens, my wife picked up on them also and they need fixing! For some reason InDesign did that and changing the justification didn't help so I'll have to manually press enter to drop those words down a line.

The blank page was supposed to act as two things, one to show the 2 images but rather than 2 images over 2 pages with equal space, I thought it might look good to put the 2 images next to one another on the far side. The other thought process was to act as a page break so the images coming past were like a new chapter, but I agree I think it doesn't work well and I may ditch that and look at what other images I have that can either fill that space or lose it all together.

Image in centre was purposely done as the image shows Corys Building on the left and the Welsh Millennium Centre on the right. Old and New in one image, a once important part of the docks on the left now for sale for apartment space and the heritage that building had now left behind but new industry, the WMC on the right that's had money spent on it to build, keep maintained and still being used for the purpose it was built for, so a page for each but joined together by space.
 
cardiff_gareth said:
Yeah those hyphens, my wife picked up on them also and they need fixing! For some reason InDesign did that and changing the justification didn't help so I'll have to manually press enter to drop those words down a line.
Click to expand...
Did you try removing hyphenation in InDesign? You can set it to part-word length, but I prefer it off, generally.
 
Looks good! It's been a long time since I was there so I found it very difficult to link the images to the text at the beginning and form a view about the topics raised. To make that connection I felt it would benefit either from a few more images with wider context, maybe even from a drone, or captions with the images. Also, the font choices had me curious. I hope you're having fun on the course!
 
disclaimer, I have no idea what I'm talking about - so ignore if I'm talking rubbish! I just fancied sharing my views.

is sequencing important in this book? I couldn't work out the logic behind the sequence of images.. it seems a little random.. it could be me not getting it though

The other thing was repetition, there are a few very similar photos - are they all required to tell the story or perhaps culling a few of them may give you an opportunity to include some others.

is the plan to print the book?
 
benc98 said:
disclaimer, I have no idea what I'm talking about - so ignore if I'm talking rubbish! I just fancied sharing my views.

is sequencing important in this book? I couldn't work out the logic behind the sequence of images.. it seems a little random.. it could be me not getting it though

The other thing was repetition, there are a few very similar photos - are they all required to tell the story or perhaps culling a few of them may give you an opportunity to include some others.

is the plan to print the book?
Click to expand...
I'm glad it's not just me!
I found it rather confusing and felt that perhaps I needed to know more about the area to benefit from it.
I couldn't really see the connection between many of the photos and wonder if some 'in-between' narrative to help others unfamiliar with the area might help.
 
Thanks all. Appreciate all the feedback and it's all good. I'd rather know what works and doesn't so it's all well received.

I thought that the forward and artist statement might have covered it but clearly not so possibly I'll move the forward or artist statement to that page break as to give me more space to expand the intro. One thing they're not keen on is adding a description to the images to sway the viewer so either the imagery needs to change, or the forward does, I'll try the later first as hand in is next week! I might break that rule with the image of the building for sale next to the lady as that building holds dear to her with past usage so I may need to add something there to explain that!

I'll have a re-jig later on lol!
 
cardiff_gareth said:
Thanks all. Appreciate all the feedback and it's all good. I'd rather know what works and doesn't so it's all well received.

I thought that the forward and artist statement might have covered it but clearly not so possibly I'll move the forward or artist statement to that page break as to give me more space to expand the intro. One thing they're not keen on is adding a description to the images to sway the viewer so either the imagery needs to change, or the forward does, I'll try the later first as hand in is next week! I might break that rule with the image of the building for sale next to the lady as that building holds dear to her with past usage so I may need to add something there to explain that!

I'll have a re-jig later on lol!
Click to expand...
what's the reason for no descriptions of the images? when I took a course the captions were key! maybe it's a photo fashion thing?
 
TimHughes said:
what's the reason for no descriptions of the images?
Click to expand...
I too would like know that. The pictures on their own tell us little or nothing around the stated theme. Captions that explain the significance of each subject will make your story come alive.

I'd suggest a drastic re-edit of the two blocks of text you already have. It's an old newspaper saying that if you preach at the readers you'll lose them. Write passionately by all means but temper the passion so that it doesn't become a rant.
 
Yeah, I'll relook at that text area.

Regarding the no text to accompany images. A lot of the photobooks I've been studying recently by photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Bruce Davidson, Paul Fusco and Nan Goldin all don't feature text with images, just a forward and then you're up to your own to piece together the images and read into them how you will. Granted their images probably flow a lot better than mine but it's early days with the image sequencing and something I'm finding pretty hard to do! There is a load of images that I'd like to include but was told by the uni lecturers these may be nice and from that area but don't fit with the artist statement and what my images are about so they were left out.

I'd like to continue this project on past university and really develop it so maybe then these images could then come back into the 'set'

I was looking at some of the more famous Welsh photographers and one such photographer that inspires me is Rhodri Jones. In his book 'Return Yn Ol' he also hasn't any words that accompany his images and his forward, albeit a lot longer than mine by several pages is laid out similarly as one side is English and the other is in Welsh so in a way I was trying to recreate some of that in my book!
 
The text and the images still don't connect well for me, maybe that doesn't matter.
 
A bit late to this party, but a couple of thoughts.

There are some 'panoramic' pics which run across a full spread which is fine, but then you have other full bleed spreads which are two pictures - which is both visually confusing and inconsistent with the other double page spreads of horizontal pictures.

I'd try to limit the number of page designs to three, maximum four. Don't try to cram too many design ideas into one project.

Also remember that what looks great as a double page spread as a PDF on screen might look crap in print when images cross the gutter.

PS 'Return Yn Ol' is a great book.
 
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