After doing my first test prints that showed me what I needed to change to improve the final outcome, one thing I did forget to change was the document size, originally I set the document up as A4, this meant I had to set up a new document and resize all of the content, this made the book feel much cleaner as it was not as big and "in your face" like the A4 was.
I was unable to get hold of the stock that I wanted from G.F Smith so I scoured some similar stock from the digital print room. This stock didn't have quite the same effect as the news print style stock that I had intended to use but it is recycled matt which gives a similar effect. The half pages were meant to be printed on to red stock but I thought that having "white ink" would stand out better on the paper, so I made the decision to print onto the same stock but with full red background to get the effect of "white ink". This also meant that the book would flow/flick through well as the paper weights would not be different. The front cover, I had the idea of using matt gloss for the front cover to make it more durable, but I did not like the way that stock made the book feel (cheap) so I went for G.F Smith 200 gsm Colour plan paper which is still durable but won't put up with rain etc.
The printing of the book went well, exactly as planned. But the front cover gave me a bit of trouble; because I had to cut it down from A1 the A3 sheet did not want to run through the printer as it was slightly too small which meant I had to cut it down to A4, this meant that I now have very little room for error when binding the book, but hopefully I can use the 10mm margin that I had to work around this. Over all the printing process was a success and I am pleased with the outcome of the images and the general feel of the book so far.
Perfect binding -
Having not done perfect binding before I was a little apprehensive about using this method, but I knew the final outcome would be worth it as it looks a lot more professional compared to saddle staple. I used the guidance of the print room technicians, peers and YouTube this helped me get a good understanding of how to put the book together in the correct way.
After seeing that some people had to reprint after binding because they cut all of the sides down before gluing I choice to only trim the spine edge, this was also because I could not make a mistake as the front cover needed to fit first time. I glued the spine with PVA left it to dry for 2/3 hours I then added some scrim which is added to help the spine become much stronger, this is glued over the spine and left over night. This stage went very well and the book was bound well without any problems like pages sticking or glue leaking.
This image shows the bind with the scrim on before the cover has been attached, but you can see that it looks solid and in place.
Glueing the cover was the next stage. Having not done this before I should have asked for some guidance, but I assumed it would be very straight forward. I used the press which is something that I shouldn't have done as this spread the glue into the first and last page of the look making it stick to, this was not a problem as I managed to get this unstuck but it now doesn't look as professional as it should. I also had slight trouble with the folds on the spine but once glued it was difficult to see where I had messed up.
As you can see from the images above the crop marks do not match on both sides, this was dude to the fact that I had to bind it with an A4 cover rather than A3. To get round this problem I decided that I would use a Stanley knife to cut the pages down with rather than the cutting machine because this may not work as well.
The cutting went to plan, although I did have some trouble with the top part of the book coming out of line. But because if the inside margin I added It does not look out of place even with the full bleed images.
Once I had cut the final part of the book this meant that I had completed the book, I am very pleased with the finish outcome, I was able to over come many problems and create the best book possible for the target audience.
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