It was important for me to create some prototypes for bookbinding before I came to the conclusion of what I would want my final outcome to be. Knowing that I wanted my final outcome to be a book wasn’t enough, I wanted to expand my knowledge of book binding and learn new ways to create books. I used a range of techniques and created some rushed finishes and some finely made books. When doing this, I found that the quality of paper played a big role in which book looked better and if the quality of paper was bad that the final outcome would not look good.

The first method of creating my book was quite quick and easy. I like having the range of easy and harder ways to create a book because I then had a range of options to choose from. I chose to create this book because it would be easier and save time, however I found that I wasn’t happy with the final outcome. Therefor experimenting with the different methods of book binding was important as if I had only created one outcome, ultimately I may not have been happy with the outcome but by then it would be too late to do anything about it.

I then created my One cut book which we had been taught how to make previously. I found that although I was happy with the outcome, the amount of detail within my book was too much to be placed into a small booklet. It looked more like a leaflet than an informative book. If I had less information then I would’ve printed it onto this.

Once I had all my binding methods printed, I found that I preferred the books that were more secure and less likely to fall apart because they looked more professional and likely to carry information. Between the perfect binding and stitch binding, I decided to choose stitch binding. This is because I only wanted the book to have 16 pages and I felt that Perfect binding looked better with more pages and with less it would look quite flat and almost like a card.

Overall testing the different methods of binding was extremely important to not only this project but to my own practise as I gained new skills on how to bind books. It helped me come to the conclusion of what type of binding I would want to choose but also confirmed that the quality of paper needed to be much better than A4 paper. I think if I could change one thing, I would print onto the paper and see what the binding would look like with the prints of my work on them just to be completely accurate but other than that I was happy with my choice.