Lucy: Final Project

My original project idea was a book with both portraits and the subjects' responses to how they express themselves on each two-page spread. I have finished a book of 25 or so subjects! But here are some things I struggled with:
1. I wanted to pay attention to the hierarchy of images, prioritizing first the portrait, then the name, and then the "expression" image(s). The formats available to me were much less flexible than I would have liked. A lot of the time I couldn't fit the expression images on the page without choosing a layout that simply didn't allow for large enough font sizes. I'll be interested in hearing how close I came (or how far I failed!) in achieving my goal.
2. The expression submissions were often of very low resolution, which meant I could only make them quite small on the page.
3. It's not ideal to ask lots of friends to do an assignment during the end of the semester. Especially after finals started I began to feel worse and worse about asking people to get their submissions in. Ideally, this would have been in the back of my subjects' minds for a long time and they could have taken their time to provide the most thoughtful and creative submission possible. I tried to help people develop their ideas, but this was difficult because I really wanted people to submit whatever they felt was right--and my input only tainted the purity of their responses. Something that goes along with that: I looked for quotes to place on the pages, explanations as to why each person submitted what they did. But for the most part, people had a really hard time responding, and I couldn't ethically put words in another person's mouth. Also, when I did get solid responses, the layout issue came into play again.

As these issues came into play, I started to get frustrated with my book. So, I started a second iteration that includes only the portraits. This brought up even more graphic design questions. Where to put each face in the book, which ones worked together and which ones didn't, how to format each page. These are aspects of the final result that I hope to discuss in my critique. But at the end of the day, I have to say I like the second iteration better, and it is the one that I will be ordering. After becoming so attached to the portraits, I really like how this book allows them to speak for themselves. The expressions book is still an idea that I am really attached to and would like to continue thinking about, but I do think the process of approaching a book that requires so much genuine, thoughtful contribution from a lot of outsiders should be reconsidered. I'd like to talk about how to improve that, as well.

One side note is that I now have two slightly different iterations of the same idea for a cover, and I want to talk about which one is more effective. I have two different first pages as well. I wish I could provide a link to the books! But there's no way to do that without allowing anyone who looks at them to edit them, and it's a little too easy to accidentally make changes that get auto-saved (a lesson I learned the hard way, unfortunately).