Guide book - Section dividers development

There was a number of suggestions from the feedback session in regards to the way in which each of the sections could be divided up and be made obvious when a new topic is about to begin. Initially, I liked the idea of having a piece of acetate gradually building up to form the rainbow, but that was not a particularly interesting way of approaching this design problem. I did some research into existing books that have had sections designed so that they can easily be differentiated by the readers. The idea to have holographic foiling on the front cover lead me to the idea that it could also be used throughout the book to work as section dividers. 

- holographic acetate

- translucent so can see the content underneath

- flexible

- durable

- different stock material to the paper so it would stand out 

- high end and not 'tacky'

- can be printed on to 

  

Another option is to use different sizes for each of the sections, similar to the stepped idea but a little less dramatic. Each section could be increasingly larger, wider or longer so that it is very easy to differentiate between each of the sections. 

- maybe more appropriate for a lower budget publication

- would be hard to perfect bound and get the squared spine that the book has been designed to have

fig. 1

A design development was made to see what a double page full bleed colour of the rainbow would look like as a section stater. It works well because it is vibrant, but the reader would not be able to quickly find the start of a new section as all of the pages in the book would be the same size. To overcome this design problem, I have thought about combining the stepped idea and also the colour idea together so that they can complement each other and work in the best way. To have the rainbow as a feature on the front cover, but not becoming the main focus. Each section will get increasingly larger to build up to a full A5 size page, allowing for a stepped effect to naturally build up in the corner of the book.  

fig. 2

- research showed that a symbol commonly used in the lgbtq+ community is the triangle 
- steps represent the journey to decriminalisation
- the physical change in the shape of the book will make the feature stand out 
- less 'garish' if it is in the corner, keeping to the brief of it being a design conscious and high-quality publication 
- the practicality of this concept as a section divider is good, the user can very easily and efficiently jump to the particular section that they want to read
- would need to have a colour key on the first page of the publication so that the reader can then refer back to it if there is a particular topic they are wanting to refer to 
- The original idea to have the whole book stepped into sections of the rainbow would have looked best if each of the sections had an equal amount of pages, something that would not work with the content have been given to work with. This idea means that any number of pages can be in each of the sections, allowing for a bit more design freedom to work with

fig. 3

fig. 4

fig. 5

Figures 3, 4 and 5 show the digitalised versions of the idea and how it would work in the bottom of the pages as the book progresses. The area in which the content can be printed gradually gets larger in each of the sections so that the last section of illustrations has nearly a full page for the artwork to be printed onto.