Bookbinding, Tate Modern and more limited addition bottles

Wow I didn't realise it had been so long since I last updated! It would take faaar too long to update on everything I've wanted it to, so i'll just narrow it down to a few things for now.

First of all, i'll start with bookbinding. When we were first given our bookbinding project, I never realised how interesting an art it actually is. Now I have only been taught 2 techniques currently. Signature binding and perfect binding. Below are scr

eenshots of the techniques that I typed up for anyone who wants to give it away. I'll try and upload the diagram version soon as well.

(The second image is actually the start to stop any confusion, I can't seem to get them to go the other way around!)

Now I didn't use either of these techniques for my own book, but only because neither would have worked for what I wanted. So instead I went and got it spiral bound. Which for only £3 turned out really well!

So thats how my book turned out. The front and back paper is a sort of opaque tracing paper with a 'distress' pattern on it that I bought in a small card shop in Cheltenham town. The actual pages are printed on double sided satin paper. I bought this for about £25 from photopaperdirect.com. Now granted they got me the paper in 2 days, however I wasn't impressed by the fact that the packaging protecting it was open when it to me, therefore all the corners of the paper were bent, so I wouldn't recommend that site.

I found this blog whilst searching for bookbinding info: http://myhandboundbooks.blogspot.com and its an absolute minefield of tutorials, information and just general inspiration for bookbinding and design. 

Not only did we have to bind our books but we also had to do all the layouts for the inside. A great book I found for this was 'The Graphic Designers Guide to Visual Communication' (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/2880468108/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=A1PNGZ27080QU) It's fantastically laid out, with great quality photos of a whole range of products from different designers. I will definately be adding it to my bookshelf when I can afford to. David Carson was also someone I looked at for his magazine layouts.

Moving on to the Tate Modern. They have an exhibition opening on 12th Feb, running until May 17th, featuring the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. I'd say this was well worth a trip for any graphic designer. This is the section for it on the Tate website: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/rodchenkopopova I'll be definately making my way to London in the next few weeks to see this!

Lastly, since getting the limited addition coke bottle in the last post, I recently picked up another limited addition bottle. This time for Frijj milkshake. They bought out a new limited addition flavour (vanilla) and I had to buy it just for the bottle design.

It's done in black and white, with this kind of scribbling effect done on some of the text. The bottles also got one of those really nice, matt feels to it, rather than the normal smooth and shiney bottles. And just as a bonus - the flavour is REALLY nice! The normal bottle designs are done by the London based design agency Ziggurat Brands (www.zigguratbrands.com) but I can't seem to find if this was done by them or by another agency/designer.

I think i'll leave it at that for now. My deadline for the book is Friday, so from then till Tuesday I have some free days so there will possibly be another update then!

xx