Exercise 6

Folding and mocking up your book

This task was split into stages and involved creating some mock ups of books by folding sheets of A4 paper. I created a few as per the instructions and explored the structure and organisation of the pages.

It was interesting to learn about the terminology involved in bookmaking during this exercise and to have the opportunity to explore how the pages related to one another. Before trying stapling and stitching my two small mock ups, I spent some time unfolding the numbered pages and looking at which numbers fell on the same sheet of paper.

For the full scale mock up, I folded the four sheets of A4 paper in half, then numbered each page up to 16. I liked reading about the trick of the magic ’17’ – each spread added up to 17! It seems like an important area of knowledge as a designer, even if this work is often undertaken by a printer, to understand how the pages will work and where everything will need to be positioned in order to print the book in the desired order.

The final stage of mocking up a book is to make decisions about which of my designs are strongest and thinking about these ideas within the context of a book. The next exercise will give me an opportunity to test out my ideas in a book format and consider how the pages turning will build a narrative.