OUGD504 Studio Brief 3 - Production Considerations

OUGD504 Studio Brief 3 - Production Considerations

Type In Context: Portobello Road is a photography book based on the antique market in Notting Hill - Portobello Market. The production of the book uses influences of antique, victorian books to create an antique feel to the publication with photography as its content, creating a unique selling point for the book. This publication therefore has quite a niche target audience and would be sold primarily at independent book shops. 

The design of the book uses the Van de Graaf grid for the photographs and uses 'Antique Velvet' stock which is case bound with a pamphlet stitch. From producing the book however, on reflection a multi-section hard case book would be more appropriate for commercial printing (this would therefore change the pagination). The photographs all comply with the following for the highest possible quality - CMYK, 300 PPI, actual size and are all saved as psd files, therefore they are all ready to print.  

Due to the nature of the layout, crop marks would be used when preparing for print as the stock is quick thick, this will allow all the pages to align when being bound. As the page construction is not full bleed, extra printer marks would not be essential as all the pages can be printed A4, then cut down accordingly to the crop marks. Not using full bleed images will reduce the price of the budget and will still allow you to create an A5 size book. As A5 is very common for book sizes this will benefit reproducibility. 

To produce the book, wholesalers such as G F Smith could be one option. Although they only produce A4 Quarter bound books, this could still perhaps fit with my publication by adjusting some elements. Ideally a high quality printer such as Precision would be the most efficient in producing the book, however it is not feasible to find out the price of this. From research online, a quote from Book Printing UK gave an instant quote of £148.19 for 20 copies of the book. This however would mean that the book would not use the desired stock and would use a cloth hardback bind. 

As the cover is screen printed and from previous experiments it found that metallic gold is best to use onto grey book rum. This would then mean that once the book is creates they would then have to be screen printed upping the cost. As this publication is for a niche market, the publication wouldn't be widespread, therefore not as many books would need to be produced. Therefore the cost of the book could be a similar higher priced book as other photography books in independent book shops are. This will cover the cost of the production methods, clarify the high quality materials and be consistent in the market value of photography books.