Box Design (feedback plz)

Here's a quick preview of what I'm thinking about doing for the book box. I agreed, from the comments in class, that the design for the box should be toned down so as to provide a nice contrast with the cover. The pic below shows both cover and box design to compare.

Feedback

More so for my own benefit, a list of all the things I need to do/figure out based on the comments given in today's final critique:

* reverse text & image back - in retrospect, it makes more sense to have the image on the inside and text on the outside
* get rid of additional text effects (fading, size increase, jumping coloured type) and simply highlight important lines with the accent colour.

* 80lb feels better than 65lb for the inside pages.
* cover should be thicker - laminated, folds should be made after lamination, but only bend to 90 degrees.
* cover design is moving in a better direction, box should be more subtle than cover so as to create a contrast, and additional info (description, credits etc. should also appear on box).
* if red binding strip is used cover & spine could be glued on as separate pieces.

New Covers, Ambigrams and such.

Here are a couple more cover concepts, I wanted to give the characters more of a spotlight since they are such an integral part of the book.


This one uses the individual frames of the animation.


and this one uses single frames of each character. I tried to choose frames that captured their essence.

Also I was thinking that for the spine I could make my name into an ambigram and then I wouldn't have to worry about how to deal with it when the book is flipped cause it would just look the same. Which was a cool thought... until I actuallt tried to make my somewhat lengthy name into ambigram form. Too tricky. Idea abandoned. But here are some tests.

New To Do

Okay so here's what I still need to figure out for my final book:

DESIGN ISSUES
* cover & box design concepts (have the colours but still haven't resolved the final design of either)








* switching the placement of text & images so as to give more attention to the text (still in the process of doing this)
* experimenting with size of text in animation, being magnified at a point and then getting smaller as it fades

PRODUCTION ISSUES
* resolve cracking in spine, reg suggested using cloth first or using moisture or a double scoring technique on the folds
* use a thicker stock for the cover
* box cover - find a material that can be printed on and covers well, or cover box with cloth first then glue on printed sides.

Cover Concept 2

Another concept for the cover, without colour this time, maybe this fits better with the inside content?

Construction

I did a test print of my book the other day just to see how thick it would actually be and if the sizing and flipping works. It was good because it let me see what I needed to fix up in terms of the layout aaand it also made me realize (from cutting each page with a ruler and an exacto) that I am going to need some sort of crazy guillotine or something, because even if I cut each page exactly with the crop marks it will not be precise enough to assure that they are EXACTLY the same size, and this is a necessity for optimum flipping. Guillotine anyone? (my book is about 1/2" thick so it needs to be a pretty sharp one)

Clocked.

So I'm thinking that instead of page numbers, which upon further thought seems slightly useless and doesn't really add anything to this project, I want to enhance that message of time and speed by using little clock icons where the page numbers would usually be. For my "fast" story, the clock will start at 9:00am and end at 5:00pm (a typical office-job work day) and will be animated in the same way as the main imagery so that when the book is being flipped it looks as though the clock is quickly spinning through the hours. And then for the "slow" story the clock will appear to tick at a slower pace.