PRIVACY NOTE

DESPITE CHANGING THE SETTINGS TO PUBLIC, SOME OF THE EMBEDDED ITEMS IN THIS BLOG AREN'T SHOWING UP

IF YOU FIND THIS PROBLEM, ALL DOCUMENTS USED ARE HERE

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nVkti6oyP2uyuEAIMk7WC_mJJj7xJu1X/view?usp=sharing

Evaluation: Working With Others

This project was particularly interesting due to the reliance that was important to have on other people. In a situation like this, your team gets to be very co-dependent, to a point. I feel Comic Nest have absolutely killed this! Whenever a member made a big decision about their book, they would post it in our dedicated group chat to gain support and opinions of the rest of the group. This was a really reassuring thing to have - especially as our work would all be displayed together, so they knew best what we were going for for the stall!

And that isn't even to mention the actual group elements of the project! I feel incredibly lucky to have had such a committed, talented group around me. Whilst there were a few times when the work may have been unfairly left to some people (as is the nature with any group piece), I genuinely felt that my Comic Nest family were brilliant in keeping up with everything they needed to do for the project.

Although this happened in almost every element of our group work, this is very obviously demonstrated in our social media work. Not only did every single member post every single week on their assigned day, but we all each shouted out the pages on our personal (initially, more popular) pages at least three times. This ensured we had a huge range of followers, and was super important in achieving the significant following we had on Instagram and Facebook.

Evaluation: Visual Analysis

My strongest sense of analysis through the production of my book definitely came in the form of tailoring my work to my target market. I wanted my book to be successful. That was my priority. I didn't even necessarily intend to like or enjoy my final product, I just wanted it to sell well! This is the reason a lot of my creative choices were made.

In retrospect, I would've liked to include more screenshots of the process to complete each page, as this would've given more insight into my train of thought whilst producing the work.

Evaluation: Communication

Throughout the extent of this project, I have attempted to illustrate the steps I took to reach this point the absolute best that I can. I tried to keep my blog up-to-date with my progress, and explain each chose I made to get me to my final point.

If I were to repeat this project, I would probably try to rewrite some of my annotation - particularly hand written parts in screenshots/layouts - as I don't think they come across that clearly to anyone but me!

Evaluation: Reflection and Problem Solving

This is briefly covered in my Spelling and Grammar post, where I detail some changes made to ensure my book is as successful and professional as possible. Another form of reflection I performed, however was due to the responses I had from our audience after my weekly social media posts. I found that my target market surprised me with their opinions a lot, and I chose to take this on board (for example; when my target market really like my "Wait -- Pasta Isn't a Vegetable?" title - something I'd previously had the full intention to drop).

Problem solving is a huge part of a project like this. A lot of my problem-based decisions are documented in my page-specific posts. A good example of this is my choices around my informational pages, where I found an issue with the background, and worked through several variations before settling on something that worked.

If I had more time on/repeated this project, I would've liked the chance to get opinions on my final product from a select few members of my target market, so that it could be altered to ensure that it's the best it can be!

Evaluation: Knowledge and Understanding

Due to my book not being a comic, it was difficult for me to utilise everything I've learned whilst studying comic arts. I did, however, find a lot of transferable skills prove extremely useful during this project.

One of those skills was just the nature of putting a book together - the use of InDesign, inclusion of bleed, correct page numbers, colour profiles, balance in pages. A lot goes into ensuring that a book is possible for print. 

Also, I feel my knowledge of social media - gained mainly through my job within the field - really helped me during the promo and - from the perspective of gaining market research - the production of my book. I feel the use of social media in a project like this is absolutely invaluable! 

If I were to redo this project, I would possibly take more influence from actual comic work. I feel a full script could've helped me here a lot.

Complete Product

In the window below, you can see my full PDF. I'm actually really happy with how it ended up and proud of what I produced.

Merchandise

We had a lecture on creating merchandise for our books and it's importance. Due to the low income of our target market, a lot of people at MCM will be looking for small, cheap things that they can just pick up and - also importantly - not have to lug around the con.

One of my clearest plans from the start was to do a print/poster of my meme pages. I knew that of all of my pages, these would be the easiest for my audience to understand, and also the most relatable (which is something that has proven to sell well). Despite the general suggestion to do all prints A5, I honestly feel my design will sell much better as a poster due to the design of it. Though I see this as a risk, I'm willing to take it because of how cheaply I've managed to find printing for this.

To create my poster design, I took my double page spread and moved things abut and added bits to make it less book-friendly! You can see these changes below...

I also want to produce temporary tattoos. This is also an idea I've had from early on, but one I was wary of, as I was unsure how it could be done. I did, however find a website (inkwear.co.uk) where I can get two A4 sheets of tattoos (approx. 40-50 tattoos) for £25 with free postage. I plan to sell the tattoos as £1 each, thus, a potential profit of up to £25 on these. For these, I will use the meme quote designs, and the 'ok sign' hand.

Using the same designs as the tattoos, I will also throw together some badges together using a badge maker and materials I already have. This is a great cheap way to make some extra money.

Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

Due to reliance on text in my book, I knew that spelling and grammar would need to be totally flawless. Due to this, I proofread my work numerous times and also got my Comic Nest groupmates to triple check for me, as I knew it was possible for me to miss something...

This was an issue that was raised with my first draft of my About page. After some research, I found I had been using the wrong one and changed it...

This was a comment on a missed 's' I hadn't noticed in my Treat Yoself page...

One of the biggest mistakes I made was in my Rainbow page, which you can see the before and after for below...

I tried to be as helpful as possible to them in response!

Something that I rectified towards the end of production was page 14. I initially wanted the drugs to be in greyscale, as I felt this fit with the general theme of the book a lot better. However, after finishing the book, I continued to feel iffy about this, as they seemed to just look like pebbles. I decided they wouldn't look too out of place and coloured them, and I'm really glad I did. I also moved the text a little to fit the page better...

List Page Design

A page I really struggled with was my final page - a list of uni essentials. I knew there would be a lot of text in this and I knew that I wanted it to be inside Milton's mouth, for something dramatic to end on! But I was very unsure of how to approach it. Below, you can see the different ideas I toyed with before choosing my final (bottom).

Book/Poster Pricing: Final Decision

After a day of researching paper thickness and finish options, as well as the optimal amount of stock bought to make the most money, I finally settled on which of the options I'd previously looked at would be best for me.

I decided on silk finish for my posters and my books, including the covers. This is due to the fact that it's a safe medium between gloss and matte.

Paper thickness wise, I wanted my internal pages to be a sensible thickness and - after researching the average thickness in books similar to my own - I decided 130gsm would be best. As for the cover, I wanted it to be thicker than a usual comic/brochure, to separate it from the comics on and around our stall (as I wanted it to be established that it's not a narrative comic). I chose 250gsm for this (was rectified after the below screenshot was taken).

As for the posters, I found that 50 posters was the same price as 30, so decided to go for 50 so that I had some stock for online sales and future cons (as my poster design is quite transferable).

Copyright Infringement - Memes and Emojis

Including memes in my book was something I was intent on from the start - this was something that would really get my audience's attention and I absolutely loved the idea of it. However, a lot of online memes have copyrights attached to them, so couldn't be use in my work. I knew I had to be very careful of this, so did a lot of research on the subject beforehand. You can find the information I discovered in my 'Useful Links' post. While I found that, sadly, a lot of the memes my audience had suggested were tied to copyright laws, I did discover that there were some that weren't (like 'doge', which is 100% usable unless it's referred to as 'doge'). I also found that a lot of 'verbal memes' were also free for use.

Similarly with emojis. They are free for use as long as they are drawn by yourself and not copying anyone else's design.

Social Media Posts - 30/4

This is my final post I'm going to be making before finishing my book. I didn't have a strong idea of what to do when planning this post. I decided on just this cute, drunk Milton with a caption "hyping" my final comic and promising a preview next week.

Including Perspective

Due to the fact we had looked into it so in-depthly during class, I wanted to utilise my perspective practice during the creation of quite a few of my pages, but particularly my bulldog clip hacks, as I felt this would really add to the pages. I'm super happy with how they worked out!

Social Media Posts - 23/4

For today's post, I finally revealed my cover. I only noticed after posting that I'd accidentally uploaded my lower quality file, so it doesn't look great. But I couldn't delete and reupload, as by the time I noticed, the posts had already achieved some engagement. I will have to be more careful looking out for this in the future.

Non-Hack Pages

The first few pages cover dedications, credits, intro and character intro. As these weren't hack pages, I wanted them to be instantly recognisable and easy to distinguish. I went through a lot of difficulty with these pages, as I wanted them to be basic and text-based, without being too boring. You can see my process in these screenshots...

Idea 1 - No background.
Idea 2 - Cover background (and then with white backing on text).
Idea 3 - Idea 2 in greyscale.
Final Idea - Idea 3 with background faded slighlty.

I also added a little, fun drawing of Milton into his profile page, as it was the last info page and I wanted them to flow into the hacks easily...

Language

Language is something that's extremely important in my book, as I want it to come across as relatable and conversational as possible for my audience. A great resource for trying to understand modern humour is Tumblr and meme culture. Predominantly, the humour is nonsensical and blunt. Here are a few key references...

I used this internet dark-humour language in my intro page here...

Inside Covers

Initially, I intended to have a pattern of repetitive tiny Milton's on my inside covers (you can see a scribbly mock up of this in my layouts), but I later decided that this would be too much and chose to have plain inside covers instead. However, the closer I got to producing the book, the less I liked the blank pages. For this reason, I decided on doing something I'd seen very evident in over book - using the pattern from the cover, but in greyscale. I also noticed that I had a lot about my Comic Nest group on my cover, but nothing about myself - not even my name! Though I didn't mind this, as this is typical for some non-fiction books, I decided to include an 'About the Author' section on the inside back cover...

Cover Design

Although I had a very successful and popular cover design in the 'self-help book' parody cover I created, I wasn't entirely happy with it. Although it was intentionally bad, I felt that hindered it's marketing ability (that was talked about in our cover design lecture). I also wanted something that really communicated my style and the style of the book - which is quite graphical and design-based.

One thing I did decide to keep from the other design was the book title. I had it there as a placeholder, mostly, and because it sounded like the typically conversational-type title a self-help book would have. But it came out as one of the most popular parts of the cover when presented to my target audience, along with the design of Milton himself.

After deciding on this title, I made the choice to include a photograph of pasta in the background. This is due to the fact that, not only do I think adding photography into a piece of art looks really striking, but also having food in branding has proven to be really attention grabbing (particularly to hungry people, which there will be lots of at MCM!). While I did try to take my own photos of pasta, they didn't come out very well (see below). For this reason, I decided to use a royalty free stock image I found online.

      

Below, you can see my final cover design...

Final Layout Plan

Above, you can see my final layouts for all my pages. The order of the pages was informed by my table plan. I wanted similar hacks to be near each other (starts with study hacks, moves through to home hacks, then food hacks), and similar design styles to be near each other (eg. with pages 8 and 9).

Layouts are the most crucial part of book planning for me. I find that once my layouts are finished, I'm more compelled to start the book itself. This is because - even though layouts aren't as necessary with this as they are with a comic - they take the intimidation out of starting a final book.

Font Choices

Font is something that is extremely important when designing a book like mine. I chose two fonts that were 100% royalty free, from DaFont.com to include in my book - one for headings and one for the bulk.

'MOON GET!' was chosen due to it's boldness, clarity, and how good it looks in all caps. I will use this font for titles and headings...

'Forced Square' was chosen because it's very edgy and modern-looking whilst still maintaining a lot of uniqueness. It's the kind of the thing that could be instantly recognisable if my book somehow became very popular! An example of both fonts are below...

Social Media Posts - 16/4

Today's social media posts were showing the bird I designed yesterday. I explained the reason and gave him a cute lil backstory to make him more relatable! As well as this, I posted the selfies we took in the meeting and explained briefly what was discussed to try to gain some hype for MCM. This was supposed to be posted on the weekend (as with all of our general posts) so as to not clash with anyone's day, but it wasn't done.

Potential Sticker Option

As discussed in the group meeting, I began designing a sticker idea for our free 'after-purchase' lucky dip. My prompt was 'red' (my colour within the group) and 'bird' (for the group logo). Below is what I came up with. However, shortly after producing this, the group altered their plan of what they wanted the sticker designs to be like. I don't mind that too much, as I wasn't very happy with this design...

Book Printing Costs

Although the uni printer offers very competitive pricing, I want a very specific finish on my book and it's cover. This is because I intend to market my product as more of a book than a comic due to the content. I hope to have a thick, silk finish cover, with natural inner pages. This is a quote I found for my specifications on mixam.co.uk -

This works out (when postage is included) to about £1.50 per book. Which is more than reasonable considering we today decided that we'd be selling our books for £5 each. I will most likely purchase my books through this site.