The Final Cut - One Thing Collection - A Series of Mini Books

After weeks and weeks of putting our creative efforts into every aspect of the design and layout of the 8 mini books, including text size, line spacing, font size, image layout, photo edits etc. we finally reached the final stages of the intense yet rewarding One Thing Collection Project.

Like I mentioned within my previous post, regarding my group work, "Steady Progression - Lookbook layout", the final six mini books, which we had left after using the first two to determine layout etc., were divided between the three of us that made up the design half of the group for this project, giving us two books each that we had to complete.

In order to create the two books which we each had to finish to complete the group project, the use of Indesign was requires as this was how Ziqi, who was the main designer behind the books, due to him having better knowledge and understanding of this field due to his masters discipline of graphic design, thought it would be best to achieve our desired look whilst still making the mini books look professional. 

I'd never used Indesign before this point, Photoshop and Illustrator yes, I ca navigate around that software like the back of my hand as its a must for any fashion designer, especially when working within the industry, but InDesign was a completely new source of creative technology to me. Because I'd never used InDesign before, I would say I did struggle to get the grasp of it to begin with, but after a few hours of messing around with the software and just basic trail and error I eventually got the hang of it and found it pretty straight forward and simple to use.

For me, being able to learn a new skill, in terms of using a new software I hadn't touched before, within this project, has been hugely beneficial, as its opened me up to new possibilities within my own design work, for example creating a book/portfolio similar to these mini-books to showcase my work to any future potential employees once I've finished my MA in a more professional, clean cut way, which is something, I might have struggled with a lot more if I hadn't of done this project and still didn't know how to use the InDesign software.

In terms of putting my two mini books together as part of the final eight, it was a fairly straight forward process as a lot of the main bulk of work had already been done by all of us within the initial stage of putting the first two books together, so as we could literally use these as a template/guide when doing the rest aka a lot of copying and pasting from the documents Mila had emailed us over, with a few correction edits here and there.

Ultimately I am happy with the outcome of the mini books, but would have been happier if communication about the final edits between Mila and the group had been made clearer as these were left very last minute due to it being made known that we ourselves would have to do the edits and not Mila, as well as technical issues with software resulting in some issues not being as clear and spacing issues.

A few images of the stages of me working on the mini-books can be seen below and the full books are available to see through the following link; https://u1267188.wixsite.com/onethingcollection

To conclude on my experience as working as part of the One Thing Collection group project, I think its been very interesting in terms of the group dynamic being cross disciplinary and also multi-lingual as we've each bounced off of each other and used our own areas of expertise in order to achieve the best possible outcome for the mini books, the research behind slow fashion as well as the website etc. and it's generally just been nice to see how other creatives, like myself, work who don't necessarily come from a fashion or design background.

Jess xo