I strolled through the library last week looking for possible, “coffee table”-worthy books that were in need of a redesign. Since my aim for my book design class is to have three, portfolio-ready pieces, I think the coffee table test is a good indicator of what can be achieved. I checked out  three books from the library, but as I started scanning them in, I eliminated one from the project possibilities. The first book that made the cut (or failed my own, arbitrary design litmus test, as it were), was Melcher Media’s Sex and the City: The Movie photo book.

Front Cover

Back Cover

I picked this book mainly because I am familiar with the content, having watched each season of the series, as well as watching the movie. Familiarization is a good thing. The second reason for picking up the book is because I just knew that the photography was going to be amazing, what with the fashion and elegance the series exudes. Sadly, the book makes a mess of it (in my eyes, anyway). While the pages contain a lot of content–there’s a table of contents that includes two introductions, background on filming, recaps of every season of the series, the movie itself, and acknowledgments–the design is all over the place.

Page 10	Page 13
Page 37	Page 174

The text pages (as shown on pages 10 and 13) are blocked in by photos that run along the top and bottom of the page (using the entire width of the page), confining the text to the middle of each page. The combination of the color behind the text, and the excessive leading given to the body text, makes the copy difficult to read. Combining that with the distracting photos (and the occasional photo bubble laid over an image), doesn’t do justice to the words or the images. Additionally, as you can see from the side by side images above, the height of the images isn’t consistent throughout the book either.

Page 92

Further along, when the images become the most central part of the book, the words and image treatment is reversed. Text is confined to thin, colorful rectangles at the top and bottom of pages. Sometimes, though, the text box and enclosed text sits three inches above the bottom of the page to make room for images. Other times, text boxes interact with the images to create a pattern of squares on the page. Because of the colored text boxes, the vast catalog of images for the book go to waste. Even without a lot of text on the page, the book occassionally tries to function as a flipbook version of the movie, as seen on page 92 (above).

My redesign of this book would attempt to respect the visual imagery of the movie’s still photography, while giving the text the room to breathe so that a reader would want to actually read the copy.

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