Picture Book

[Doug Berry]

Ian Weller Wrote:
> I was still thinking we were going to put in stories of
> people. Are we
> going to do this on top of the image, or are we going to do
> it to the
> side (like I did in this mock up[1])?
>
> [1]:
> http://ianweller.fedorapeople.org/picture-book/mockup-spevack/mockup-spevack.png

This is great, Ian. We are definitely NOT locked into anything.
In fact, the more original the better.

We have all sorts of options concerning layout. So lets take a
typical book: lay it on a table; open the book by lifting up the
cover and half the pages until they are vertical; now, the page
you can see, on that part of the book, that is still laying on
the table is the BASE PAGE; the page on the part of the book you
are holding up is the BACK PAGE.

Most people put the more important content on the BASE PAGE. For
example, if you go to the library and look at one of those large
over-sized art books containing high quality reproductions of
some long-dead artists works; usually all of the artwork is on
the BASE PAGE. Any text or comments would be on the BACK PAGE.

This is an unofficial industry standard, but by no means absolute.
It is primarily based on the fact that for English readers (left
to right) all of whom are assumed to be right-handed, the most
comfortable way to hold a book is balanced in the palm of your
right hand. When doing this, the BASE PAGE is the easiest page
to read; you have to turn and reposition the book to read the
back page.

So, lets take the example Ian provided: mock up-spevack.png.
Laid out for the computer screen, where monitors show things
left to right with the widest dimension to the sides, it's
fine. But if we printed it, as is, on a book page, widest
dimension top to bottom it would be sideways. People would
have to turn the book to read the text and view the picture.
We can easily overcome this by rotating the picture and text.
Now we have picture on top, text on the bottom, or vice versa.
Or we can center the picture a partial ways down the page,
with some text on top and some text on the bottom. 

So, for large rectangular whole-page images we should probably
place them on the base page. But we are not locked into just
that. We can use half page images: half image, half text. Or
we can use use web layout, smaller images where the text wraps
around the image.

But a important standard, where you have an image with related
text, is to have the image on the BASE PAGE and the text on the
adjoining BACK PAGE. When you have the book spread open, you
can look at the image, then turn your head and read the text.
Look and read, look and read.

This sort of thing can be done with half-page also. The point is,
however, that if we have stories or text that relates to a certain
image, we should keep them together if at all possible.

Along these lines, I a working up some example images of book page
layout, which I will post to the wiki asap.

-- Douglas Berry --
slasherzee at fedoraproject.org