Photography Yearbook

This morning, Jason from Evolution Print who are producing the yearbooks came into college to talk to us about what is possible and to provide us with a rough guideline. Below are a few notes.

• We mentioned as we might have photographs across both pages, a coptic bound book may work well. As we would not lose any of the image once bound, unlike a perfect bound book. 
• However Jason mentioned we should think about quantity and budget. Think about the commercial aspects of the project. What might be a great idea might not work. As they are commercial booklets.
• Minimum 300 books.
• Digital you pay for every sheets, Litho you pay for a make ready. 
• For an idea of price and what is viable. Jason gave us an example of last year — 500 perfect bound, uncoated 120g text, 300g cover, 92 page book was just over £3000.
• All four books were similar last year, everyone had perfect bound books. 
• Think about stock. Gloss and matt in the same publication is possible. But you would have to work out the pagination, as we work in 4, 8 and 16s. So 8 page gloss section or 4 page gloss section.
• Gloss section can look nice in an uncoated book.
• On commercial printing they can only print up to 450g.
• Trucard — Coated one side, uncoated on the other.
• Every time you do a heavier cover, you have to create an extra set of plate and make readies so it comes at an additional cost. An alternative would be a self cover, same sheet as text.
• When perfect binding, the spine has to be over 3mm. They can work this out if we send them the indesign document in single pages.
• Try get the final design sent to Evolution Print by May 22nd.

No individual budget, its just one overall budget. So if we're not over ambitious we should be fine.
Might have to compromising on a few things to achieve the most important elements.
Roughly around £3000 — £4000
We could possibly push for a bit of a bigger budget as we think Photography need high quality stock.
Possibly matt and gloss within the same publication
33 photography students
Newsprint will bleed, so wouldn't be as good quality.
They liked the example of Crack magazine we took in.
We also proposed a bigger size than standard yearbooks, which they also thought was a good idea.
Get a sense of scale with a big publication.
Coptic bound may be a bit more expensive than perfect bound, but would depend on quantity.
Working in 32, 64 or 96 would be cheaper.
Get the format, stock, pages etc. finalised in the next two weeks, so that we can get an estimate from the printers. Then if we have to make cuts, we have the time to rethink.
Something small and chunky or bigger and less pages.
All yearbooks are always a similar size.
Depends on how many images they want to include.
Would a newspaper format devalue the the yearbook.
Newspaper size, heavier stock maybe?
Quantity wise, they are thinking 500 books.
Keen to not include the year, so it becomes more timeless.
Half the pages, but bigger page size.
One project per person, max 6 images each. Last year was only one image person and in their opinion it was a bit boring.
Less text, more people will read it. More text, less people will read it.
Around 120 words artist statement, plus contact details.
They really want an online version, and how it would work.
Do they prefer the size or the the fact it could be a newspaper.
What if we just had big sheets, which was contained within something. A folder possibly.
These could then be framed.
Save on binding etc.
Perfect bound, but perforated along the edge so that we can take sheets outs. But possibly too expensive.
They like the idea for single sheets.
For next week, we will try think of ways we can hold/bind single sheets.
The idea of framing/displaying the work is also nice and would be unique to photography.

They had thought of the name Lux, which is a measure of light.

Anything over A5 starts to get over the postcard feeling.

Cheaper cost effective solution similar to the Aesop box.

Loose sheets, gets away from the book. But how do we hold these sheets together. Bind method?

Lux has connotation to luxury? Maybe a newspaper wont is appropriate?

Coptic stitching could still work with the name Lux. The laying flat is a real advantage.

Temporary bind is nice, such as the ring binder. Enables people to take out sheet to display. Similar to an exhibition.

Not just a standard yearbook, another use. Considering this is photography too. A lot of people frame and put up imagery on their walls.

Joe has a book by Anthony Burrill which is basically heavy stocked posters that is perfect bound but loose, enabling us to tear each out. This could be ideal for this project.

So would still work as a book, but also tear out sheets, if you wanted to display them.

Possibly is a cheers alternative to perforating.

Bigger size, so maybe one sheet per person.

In terms of deadlines — if we work backwords from the deadline for print, we can start to figure out when we need the imagery/text etc. We shall email this across to the photography team when we get this sorted.

First week back from Easter break. Friday.

A short 120 words bio.

Sample images, so we can start to think about layout. Range of sizes too, square, landscape and portrait, as we don’t know what we will be dealing with. Need to figure out a layout that works for all sizes.

Photography meeting 23 April 2015.

I received an email from Danny on Monday stating the total estimate is above the overall budget allocated to yearbook, thus asked us if we could make any changes to bring the price down. We also received another email from Danny informing us that Jason would be coming into college this afternoon, so we can bring questions to him then.

I mentioned the situation with the group on Monday and we decided to meet up yesterday to discuss how we could save money. Considering we had a meeting with Photography today, it was necessary to discuss these issues before we presented them to the Photography team. During our meeting yesterday we made a list of ways we could save money and what compromises we might have to make, which we bought up today in the meeting.

Furthermore, following yesterday’s discussion we also individually started to think about page layouts so that we could present these in today’s meeting.

Below are some notes from the meeting earlier today.

They liked the physical samples that we had taken in, good example of what we can expect.

Photography are numbering their photos from stating their favourite. This helps us we can use their favourite image as the big image on one side, then smaller images on the reverse.

In terms of layout, we think it would be better to have two bio pages then two bigger images. So that a big images does not get confused with the smaller images of the previous person.

As all the image sizes are different and because we do not know how many images each student is going to supply. Thus, it is difficult for us to start designing. We cannot figure out a grid or format that would work for everything.  The alternative would be to have the images scattered but following a grid system, so that there is still some structure to the design and not randomly scattered.

We showed them the visuals we had done yesterday, and they were more than happy with it. They didn’t think it looked bad either.

No titles for the photographs, but just the project.

Name, contact details, bio, project title.

No text on the exhibition side. As if someone wanted to frame the image, it would clean and more professional.

We also had thought about what we would do with landscape images. We suggested that we should rotate the image 90 degrees so that it fits into the portrait book. This wouldn’t matter as this book is not a conventional book, people will take out pages so would not be an issue. Would only be an issue if it was a standard book and readers had to keep on rotating the book.

You want the image big as possible and you don’t want a landscape picture on a portrait page. It wouldn’t do the photograph justice. The photography team were happy with this solution. They were happy for us to rotate their images.

A sacrifice we could make is the small booklet inside holding the contents etc. We can ask Jason later this afternoon how much this would save us. Also, we wouldn’t mind sticking in these booklets too. We presume this would save us money, so this could be another option to save money.

We also thought about reducing the size down to B4. Hopefully using a standardised paper size would also save some money. They wouldn’t want to compromise on the size any more. To be honest, we do not want to either. A big yearbook will be different to standard and previous yearbooks.

We could compromise on stock, however it wouldn’t be as functional when taking out pages. It may be too flimsy. Moreover, we need the book to be over a certain depth to allow for it to be perfect bound.

We were also having issues with the name ‘Lux’ — we don’t think it looks very good, and we don’t want people to think it’s a shortened version of Luxury. Although conceptually strong, it might just not work. We agreed we would all try thinking of new names, if not then we still have Lux. However it’s not stopping us from progressing at the moment.

Another way to save money would be to have one standard stock. But as there a divide, we could ask Jason if there is anything in between. Also having gloss and matt pages randomly throughout the book would mean the price also increases, as this would be done by hand. So we should try avoiding this.

Ask Jason for samples of stock.

This afternoon Jason from Evolution Print also came into college to discuss ways we could cut the costs for our yearbook projects. This was ideal as we already had a few suggestions from our meeting earlier today with the photography team. However prior or discussing price, we learned that books were not taxable. It was the tax that was taking us over budget, thus we may be on track now and not have to make so many cuts.

Nevertheless we still spoke to Jason about our projects and clarified a few things.  Even though we may not need to make cuts now, it would still be ideal if we could save money.

As we had a couple examples of the type of book we were looking for, it was good to show Jason a physical example. He kept the books so that he could shows the guys back at Evolution Print.

Jason also stated that B4 might not even save money as it depends on the bigger sheet of paper. Making a small change wouldn’t make a difference really.

Cheap uncoated stock for the 4 pages that will hold contents etc.

We also mentioned to Jason about the stock issue. If the gloss and matt are together it would be cheaper. As the sheets can be removed, there is no need for it to be indexed alphabetically anyway. Cheaper 50/50 than 70/30.

We also asked about satin stock, which is like a flat matt, in between gloss and matt. Jason said he would be able to provide some samples of a job they did on a similar stock. Flat silk stock, but still retains the colour.

We also said we should up the stock to 300gsm, as we guessed 200gsm but 300 was more like the sample we showed.

Due to other projects needing to be prioritised, this project didn't really get anywhere in time for hand-in but is obviously something that will be getting done as soon as the hand-in is out of the way.