OUGD504 - Brief 03 - Production Issues

The images below are of what I thought was going to be my final publication. When it came to the day of printing the final cover of my book and the binding, I definitely rushed and didn't pay enough attention to detail. I wasn't thinking about the binding properly or the positioning of the front cover, which lead me to ruin this version of the publication. 

The main issue I had were with the registration marks of the front cover. When I was screen printing, the ink seeped through the silk screen, creating quite a rough and messy effect which I actually quite like. But, this bleeding ink made it impossible to see the registration marks when I was cropping the book down as a whole at the very last stage. When I cropped the book, I cropped everything based on these crop marks, which meant that I unfortunately cropped content from the sides of all of the spreads. I understand that this was a very easy mistake to make, and I should have paid closer attention to this when actually exposing my screen.

Next time I will make sure to post-harden the screen to get crisper prints and to make sure the print is aligned and positioned exactly on the centre of the paper. When I reprint and bind the publication I will make sure to crop the cover down first rather than basing all the cropping on the front cover's registration marks. 

The other main issue I had was not thinking enough about the binding method. I knew that I wanted to use a saddle stitch technique, I was just unsure of how many holes I wanted. So, I decided to stab 17 holes in the spine of the book in order to create a stitched effect. This was a mistake. The GF Smith graphite stock combined with the 120gsm inner stock was very, very thick. I should have used the drilling machine in the book binding workshop, but instead I used the stabbing tool to create the holes. This completely ruined the spine and causing noticeable cracking of the ink on the inner pages. I then had to abandon threading the 17 holes, and ended up stitching thick thread through the middle hole and two others (a traditional saddle stitch approach) It didn't look that bad in the end, but you can still see where I made the other holes and the cracking on the paper. 

Here you can see the extent of the cropping issue: