Oscar Bown

To recap, my project is a book about my (mostly Mario) Nintendo collection. I like collecting video game merchandise that ties in with series' that I like to play. It came to my surprise to find that there was not a lot of books, blogs or any real discussions about video game merchandise – most certainly the more obscure products. So I decided to make a book about my collection that's has high quality pictures, descriptions of both the product and my personal experience with them. For the start of the project I was looking into video game memorabilia collecting blogs, books, videos and forums. I wanted to see what they have done before and see if I could do anything different to stand out or find something of worth to use in my own work. I noticed a common theme with each source that I read, the page layouts was not engaging. To avoid this I made sure that the book I designed would have different layouts to keep the reader engaged. It is also informative describing what the r...

I'm now finalising the page layouts of the book about my Nintendo collection. Due to time the final book will instead be a booklet with twelve pages, originally it would it was going to be a book of sixteen. I'm really ok with this being a bit shorter in length as I'm going to make this book over the course of a couple of years from now. So this is more of a prototype but a greatly designed prototype as this is the style as I will make the proper book like. This week I have also spent my time cutting out each picture in Adobe Photoshop and giving it a grey background making it look professional. I have also changed the intro pages by making it solid red with bold text and a picture of of what's to come mixed with the red. This has a very slick and professional design that I'm quite found of. Which means the graphic pages are now not as common as the all red pages. This week I have learnt about cutting out pictures in Adobe Photoshop and making slick pages. ...

This week I started working on the page lay out and the over all design for the book. It is important for me that the layout, typography, pictures, graphics and overall style shines bright. For the first test for what the book layout might look like, I chose the Mario Pikachu promotion and the Video Game All-Stars Mario Kart 64 Figures. The reason I chose these is because the Mario Pikachu promotion is so peculiar and out of these world while the Mario Kart figures are some of the most sort out Nintendo collectibles on the market. Again using my Pinterest examples I using in my scrapbook. Using pictures that I have already taken in a light box, I cropped them so they can have a transparent background. For the text I used: DIN Alternate because it gives a pleasant vibe that stays with the rest of the book. I used graphics that I have made to help give the book some identity. Overall I think the look I was going for is going to be a reality.

I'm still knee deep in doing prototyping and working things out for my book. I think that the book will need to have the same graphical style to keep the book focused. So that means I gave the main Mario icon a full body using the same style. I also gave him the simplified treatment for when it was a head. Besides on working on making the Mario icon better I have also been working on the book layout and typography. Since I want the book to bee fun yet informative I need to make sure the type isn't too distracting. I went back to my Pinterest inspiration to help get a slick, modern and simplistic style for presenting information. I noticed that a lot of the pictures I saved had a certain grid that they stuck to in order to keep in character. I also found some more examples of book layouts have I have created templates for myself to follow. With these templates there are guides that are there for me to follow and to keep titles, texts and pictures in an orderly fashion. However e...