Beware of the Walls. My Journey Into Book Binding.
October 17th, 2005I’ve written about Cold Killer often on other sites. I’ve even put up an entire photo album of Cold K tags on Flickr. I think more people should know about this. Judging by the amount of Cold K photos on Flickr, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
My fascination with these ubiquitous ghosts began in the fall of 2004 when I began noticing them all over the city. Sure, there were other taggers painting all over Seattle, but Cold K’s expressionless ghosts were identifiable, noticeable, and varied enough in style that they didn’t become boring. I imagine that if I owned property in the city I wouldn’t be too fond of graffiti artists but, since I don’t, and since I’ve always been a big fan of culture subversion, Cold Killer is my favorite tagger in Seattle.
So I began photographing.
I had a photography class last year during my senior year of college. I took that as an opportunity to splurge on a decent digital camera and started on my quest to document this art.
His art quickly became my own as I logged hundreds of photographs of these subjects using varying angles, exposures, and frames. It’s amazing how much more you will shoot given the digital age’s no-cost media.
I turned in my Cold Killer documentation as a final project in the introductory photography class, but felt like the project remained unfinished. I wanted the photographs presented in a more suitable manner. I wanted the documentation to manifest itself in something more tangible than a photo portfolio.
The idea for a book was born. At the moment, I am making that book.
I began laying it out last night like I promised myself I would. Here is an initial mock up of two example pages: mockup.png.
The layout process is rather tedious, but I’m quickly learning to employ the use of guides and snap-to grids in Photoshop. The pages are laid out on a tabloid sized template in landscape mode. After alotting the proper amount of paper for margins and binding, each page should end up being 7.25″ x 10.50″. I want the book cover to be constructed of something unusual… like plywood or something. There’s no end to what you can do with a book made out of plywood.
Oh, yeah. I’ve never made something like this before in my life. I really have no idea what I’m doing. I figure after countless hours of laying out pages and building this labor of love, I will, inevitably, transcend both space and time in a flurry of misplaced rage.
Keep an eye out, I’ll post updates on my progress as it happens. It will happen, I promise.
October 30th, 2005 at 8:33 PM
Just as a matter of practicality, you should try doing the layout in InDesign, and the graphics in Photoshop.
If for no other reason, I’m fairly certain printers won’t be very appreciative of somebody giving them a massive image and asking that it be printed as a book.
If you’d like, I could help you out some with InDesign, as I’m using it for a fair number of my courses in uni and I’m pretty proficient with it.