Brief
Given the current development of the book from printed to digital technologies,
What do you see as the future of the book, for readers, and book designers?
Where do you see the book heading?
Show and tell.
Try and summarise your thinking into a series of short statements, quotations, images (collage) or ideas.
Be creative in how you approach this.
Use your learning log to reflect on the essay and your own thoughts and visual ideas about the future of book design.
This research will feed into part of your first assignment.
Starting this task, I didn't have any specific predictions of how the future of books is going to look like, from the history described in the workbook.
So I decided to do a bit of a further research in order to have better understanding and guesses.
I have found few statistics and some interesting articles/ interviews which gave me a better understanding that books are here to stay.
I loved the most the Ted mini series with Chip Kidd, whom is probably the number one inspiration for me for book design approach. I also love how he explains things and gives his very interesting point of view.
I used this talk along with some of the other references below to create a brain storming/ collection of ideas.
research videos
Articles -
A beautiful quote from the article What Will Become of the Paper Book? from 'Slate' website
"This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation—a select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencia’s and Foer’s, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary—one of literature’s greatest themes has always been itself."
Sketchbook and brainstorming / gathering visual ideas.
Q. What do you see as the future of the book, for readers, and book designers? Where do you see the book heading?
I think the published printed book will never die. As I have written in my paper above, a beautiful book is a decor piece for one's house as well as showing people from the outside what one have accomplished (as well for oneself - a reminder for his/her accomplishment) or what they resinate with. It is also something one can take with him/her on a vacation and feel so disconnected from the reality and routine back home. A book on an shelf can last for a long time and bring in emotions and information for generations to come.
So I think the future of the book wouldn't be the end of printed books, rather just accomodating our modern day and age when people are rushing and multi tasking, information is available everywhere but if one wants to learn and deepen their knowledge they would want to purchase a book. Some books would be more accomodating for audiobooks such as more informative books, maybe someone who likes to read multiple books at the same time but travel a lot will carry a kindle or read through their tablet.
For design based books such as creative book design there would always be a printed sacred spaces in my eyes (Photography/ illustration based books) Everyone loves a good coffee table book / magazine based book (which again becomes a decor piece) or a library full of books (some even organise it by color or hight - including myself).
For example, I just designed a book for print which involved texts and beautiful photography, this can't be replaced by an audiobook, and also wouldn't be as impressive on a screen.
A kitchen with a beautiful cook book is again a decor piece and also defining the theme of the kitchen I find. For example, when I have traveled to a beautiful spanish styled villa in the south west of australia, there was a matching cook book opened on a beautiful display item made of still (a book holder) and the theme of the recipes was middeterenean. It brings people into the theme of the design and becomes inseparable from the architecture and interior design.
So to conclude, I think the printed book will stay, and other formats will support our everyday fast paced lives. I think the readers and consumers will choose where they source their books, and which formats, but still keep printed books in their homes (at least one). I think designers wouldn't have to adjust too much, as the main softwares for creating books (such as indesign for interior, and photoshop for covers) would probably stay the same, just will have print based measurements or not for online. I think for audiobooks the cover matters a lot as just like buying a book by it's cover in a book store, selecting your book online for audio version will be based on the design as well.
Reflection
This task wasn't so easy for me, I think that I tend to not try and predict the future, rather than just go with the flow and see how life evolved and unfolds. I also don't really like to work with my hands by creating boards of visual ideas as I don't feel like I'm able to manifest exactly what I want to in my hand as my drawing / writing typeface is not so 'pretty' in my eyes. I guess it is a lot of self judgment and criticism as it's probably don't have to be 'perfect' but I defiantly had to go out of my comfort zone to use my hands on my visual book, and to bring in some ideas about the future.
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