Statement of Intent:
This project is an activity book I created for my mentor Athira. When we talked she was very passionate about art museums and travel, explaining she travels with her parents and visited an art museum in every city they visit. We discussed the importance of interaction and user experience, and it led me to create this activity book entitled ‘Art Hunt’. The book is interactive in every way I could think of; there are drawing prompts, writing prompts, a linked Spotify playlist, and more. I included multiple methods of use in case she didn’t resonate with certain prompts and pages, and overall wanted this book to be as true to itself as possible.
Ideation:
Our first exercise was to reflect on gifts we’d received in the past that stuck with us. I had multiple, because I tend to get emotional about gifts! My overall takeaways from this exercise were that good gifts usually require good timing, a friend paying attention to your wants and needs, and effort. I made this doodle of all the gifts that came to mind for me: my Nintendo Switch, a copy of Heartstopper, a ring, and a pizza my friend surprised me with.
Next, we explored containers and worked on making them suit the item inside them. My group had a bottle of ink, so we began ideating container shapes that would adequately fit the bottle. 
I started with these hourglass-shaped boxes, which I ended up using in my final container. My friend mentioned squids because we were working around an ink bottle, and I decided to make a squid out of pipe cleaners to sit on top of the box and help it open and close.
I decorated the rest of the box, and here is the final product! Next, we were to meet with our mentors to talk about what kind of gift they might want. Athira and I bonded a lot over how much we love digital creation as opposed to building things in real life. She also talked about how she loves art museums and traveling, making an effort to visit the art museum in any city she visits. I thought this was really cool, and it made a lot of sense to me to make a sort of interactive museum book that she could fill out as she walks through any art museum. I started stalking her Pinterest, as one does, and found a lot of cool illustrations and posters inspired by the 1990s/2000s and some incorporating the Danish Pastel aesthetic and color palette.
Iteration / Production:
I started sketching (very roughly) on Procreate for the cover, but I soon realized I was going to use Illustrator for the final product so I moved there.
Next, I made the front and back cover, but I went through a lot of different color palettes before I decided on one.
Honestly, the covers seemed to take the most time of all the pages. I was super indecisive about color palettes, but once I figured that out I hit the ground running and made the rest of the pages pretty easily. Here is the final cover; I changed the cool pink to a warmer one and swapped the coral color for an orange.
I also added a dark green to my color palette on Illustrator because I felt like I needed some more contrast and I didn’t want to use plain black. Something I learned continuously throughout this project was balancing different fonts and being more creative with my page layouts. Here are a few different iterations of the same page, using different font combinations.
I was super excited about how much creative liberty I could take with this project, but it definitely got a little overwhelming at times knowing how many tools there are on Illustrator to use. At some points, I got super caught up in tiny details that didn’t need more effects. For this title, for example, I felt like something was missing, so I tried to add some sort of connection between the two words, which ended up looking strange.
I tried this a few more times:
It still looked strange, so I kept it simple and redid the title in another, more consistent font.
I had multiple of these predicaments throughout the process, like when I made this sculpture page.
At first I was really trying to make a nineties magazine themed page, but in the end it just didn’t work out, so I went for something a little more modern. It was really fun to work with gradients and shaping text for this page!
Along with my work in Illustrator, I added some of my own doodles from Procreate to make the book feel more user-friendly and fun. I thought it would be funny to also add a page that features my little character from my sketchbook, Mr. Star, since he is pretty fun and versatile. It was fun to combine the two platforms and styles!
Another thing I had to think about was how the pages would be printed in order. I knew I was going to layer the pages to bind the book together, but that meant I had to spend some time re-ordering each page so they printed correctly. I used a website to figure out the order, and also made a really rough paper prototype to make it more concrete.
Next, I started thinking about the container for the book. Obviously I didn’t anticipate the book being super three-dimensional, so I worked on making the container to match the style of the book. I found this image on Pinterest that inspired me.
I wanted my container to unfold around the book, with doodles that related to certain elements of Athira’s list of interests that she put in the mentor spreadsheet. She mentioned cats, music, and baking, so I just made some drawings of those things to start with.
Next, I added fun picture frames to each of these pictures to relate to the museum element of it all.
Then, I arranged them in a square and made a pattern of the frames for filler pages and for my packaging. I used a template from pacdora.com that I modified to fit my measurements and used that to construct a template for my container.
Finally, I printed everything out; I had to print multiple times, double and single sided to try and figure out what would be the best for my book. I didn’t want it to be too thin but I also didn’t want to have it fall apart from being too heavy.
This is from when I printed and bound it single-sided, meaning I had to paste two pages together in order to put the book together. The edges started to slip because the book was so thick. I reprinted it single-sided, but the backs of each page were flipped. I reprinted a million times, which ended very poorly, but I ended up finally with a copy that worked. I took some time to make my container. Here is the first attempt.
This one was pretty messy, so I remade it a different way. I used glue to hold it together instead of staples and bound my final book with glue as well. Once I printed out my book and had my container assembled, I photographed it all together; here is the final product!
Reflection:
This project was definitely super fun for me, especially since I got to work digitally for the most of it. I feel like it was one of our more open-ended projects this semester, and it got me to think more about whoever will be using my designs. It also helped me better hone in on a certain style; I felt like there were a lot of different possibilities for the book but I had to make sure I was responsible with keeping the fonts and colors consistent throughout the whole project. I definitely got stressed near the end because I was sick for a few days before the due date, but overall I feel like I paced the whole thing pretty well until that point.
Link to download Illustrator template: Illustrator Template