dj book self-critique

there's something so enchanting about small books! i don't know why. they give me a modest little surge of dopamine. my most recent mock-up is a full color 5x5 scaled down version, to test some of the changes i implemented since last my layouts appeared on the blog. after taking care of some nitpicky, housekeeping, digital craft sorts of issues, such as removing almost-white backgrounds and making sure bled images actually bleed as far as they need to, i really sat about analyzing my color palette in hopes that the background color of my cover would be revealed to me in an epiphany. unexpectedly, it worked. once i identified that red appeared on almost every page as (at the very least) an accent, it was simple enough to replace some of the imagery i was least attached to with images that were just as strong, but also more red. this unification of red splashes joins forces with my 8square grid to tie together many spreads of what could be viewed as fairly disparate objects in a way that uses some level of continuity from page to page.

having established a color field for my cover, i set about scanning the word "scratch" repeatedly, wagging the paper as the light-bar interacted with the text, trying for that perfect visualization of the sound of a recordscratch. amusingly, i think the one i've ultimately chosen may have been one of the first tries. sometimes, dumb luck makes perfecter than practice. very, very rarely... but sometimes.

another thing that jamie and i had discussed was my attempt at using the greater-than symbol (>) between my values to try to invoke the play, skip, or fast forward buttons. hint: it wasn't working. she recommended that, if i wanted to utilize that imagery, i would do better to go ahead and utilize it. after some cursory image searching, i constructed my very own advance track/fast forward symbol.

 the design in the center of my first new cover looked like this:

which i was pretty pleased with, although i also tried black on red instead of white. 3 out of 3 randomly selected classmates given a quick-opinion-survey agreed that white was the way to go. it still looked a little flat, though, and that first page of headphones has such bright colors on it! to go from just red and white (and a little bit of black) to those vivid headphones wasn't really working for me. so i began analyzing my colors again, to see if i could find supplemental hues, those that maybe didn't show up on every page like red did, but did turn up again and again, sprinkled throughout. i could. those were blue, yellow, and green, and they made appearances on all kinds of labels and screens and buttons and knobs.

i moved to the following cover, careful to lighten my blue and green so that they didn't value-fight the red:

(you probably might not notice that my 3 values have changed. during my talk with jamie, we unearthed a worry that the intentions behind iconoclasm and revisionism were too similar, and i found that by using a word like remix instead, i can indicate towards what my culture actually is rather than staying so lofty and ideological. at the same time, progression was never a terribly exciting word, so i opted for a stronger, related word like revolution, which is a bit more accurate, culturally speaking, and which also has a bit of a pun on the turntables, if you stop to think about it.)

the following are my new, improved, dj-spreads, complete with gently unified colors, slightly cleaner images, and more attractive grid obedience.

the addition of another angle of red headphones, giving the green ones company in their not-vertical orientation.

cleaned out the background of black sabbath vol 4.

happened upon some red turntables! so handsome. also swapped the two right-side images for cleaner, more engaging photos. that means this spread got a 50% turnover, and much for the better.

this spread felt pretty sturdy, although i'm thinking now about shrinking the things on the right page a little because when i trim a book to a smooth outer edge, i lose quite a bit of information along that side.

i spent a great deal of time looking for a high-res "ferrari macbook" because it would have been very ideal. i was never able to get better than about 400px, which was insufficient for the double-block space i wanted it to occupy. i settled for injecting a red dj-interface into the screen of the far-right computer.

that full-bleed column was previously occupied by two tower-speakers with a confusing white space between them, dividing my grid-unit in two. i found this much nicer speaker to fill the space... (and it even had red.)

this one didn't really need much help, just housekeeping.

here, i did some minor mic replacing with better specimens. check out that fancy top left.

and finally, these guys. i have spent so much time trying to figure out what to call them. stringing together words like "metal sound equipment case" over and over again. turns out, if i'd just asked collin or michael, they would have told me immediately that it was a "road case," and i wouldn't have had to struggle for so long trying to guess that name. oh well. learn something new all the time! this spread swapped a row for a column in bleed images.