OUGD505 - Product, Range, Distribution - App Booklet

To make the app more commercially presentable, I wanted to make a booklet explaining to a hypothetical developer how the app worked, why it looks like it does, how it could be expanded on in the future if it's successful, as well as it's potential implementations for educational purposes.

I decided to use a 2x3 grid on B5 pages because that leant itself well to being able to fit 3 of the phone screens per page if needed, whilst still giving me the option to split text into two columns if I needed too. I did a couple of quick calculations to work this out to try and keep the phones at real size to communicate the scale of the app.

 

The test prints came out pretty well as shown below, but there were a couple of issues. The navigation page in particularly was hard to plan because of it's complexities.

 

I also thought the page numbers were too close to the bottom of the page. I halved the page size to remedy the size issue, and moved the page numbers to the top right corner, where there was more space. However, I found that the smaller page size combined with creep made the page numbers in the middle very close to the edge.

 

I sorted this out by shrinking the content down to just below half size on the half size page. This allowed more room at the bottom of the page for the page numbers so I could keep them there, and it gave more whitespace around the edge of the booklet to minimise the effect of creep. This did work on the individual spreads, but it doesn't show in the full colour mock-up because I messed up the trimming of the top and bottom of the booklet.

Halving the booklet to make it more manageable also came with the benefit that it was printable on A4 paper, whereas previously it had to be printed on A3. Not only does this make it cheaper, but it also gives me more choice in terms of what stock I wanted to use. The off-white samples I ordered from G. F. Smith are shown below. I decided to order the Ice White (left center), as I felt that given the large amount and variation of colour inside the booklet, a stronger off-white would be a bit distracting. The printing will be done next wednesday during my print slot.

I tested the G. F. Smith paper for how well 8 sheets of it would staple by folding one sheet over itself numerous times, and found that stapling worked fine. I'll be using stapling as the binding method because it's ease add's to the commercial aspect of the booklet.