Creating the final book: Initial designs/full scale rough

Given that I had now decided my book was going to be a collection of interrelated images rather than a straight forward narrative I first decided to draw out a series of very quick roughs. Initially these were just words relating to pieces of work or themes within my research that I then drew out so as to gain an idea of how my book would feel and pace.

There were some key aspects of my work that I was definite I wanted to include: mainly the more cinematic soundscapes as well as the pulsating circular one, the dramatic but ambiguous creator figures and finally the brief storyboard referencing (but not explicitly showing) the creating of the first record for Warp). I then created I full sized, full colour mock up of all 16 pages.
With this in mind I had six, solid roughs produced that I would simply need to further refine however there was still a lot left to be worked out.

In the last image I decided to add in images of wires and aux cables so as to better communicate the aspect of electronic creation. However in hindsight this seemed slightly dumb and ham fisted so in my final version I'm not going to include them.

In my mind the inner and outer pages of my book needed to be slightly more minimal with a lot of negative space left so as not to be too jarring right at the start/end of the book. I therefore decided to go with images of the rhythmic landscape I had produced within my mock concertina book.

Although they do serve the purpose and fit the aesthetic I wanted for the them, they do seem slightly dry and perhaps need some way of working the yellow of the colour scheme in so as to add a little more intrigue.

With four pages left I attempted to create a double page spread showing another creator figure so as to give the book a sense of visual and thematic consistency. However I really didn't like the rough for a variety of reasons such as composition and tone (it seemed quite dark and violent).

Furthermore when reviewing the images in sequence I felt it had become to figurative so instead I decided to do another rough based off of the the spread of 4 audio landscapes drawn within my sketchbook. Although I think this image does work better, particularly with regards to visual consistency due to the blue and yellow, I still don't think its spot on. This is because, in my mind, much like the images for the inner and outer pages it feels slightly like it's just serving as a filler page and not really offering much.

Finally I went about creating a series of more three dimensional feeling, sonic mountains. These started out as a series of roughs that were tempting to create another double page spread within my book. I was pretty happy with these images from the start due to the dynamic yet minimal aesthetic to them.

However, although in the rough they started out as a spread I soon decided that I wanted them instead for my front and back covers. This was so as to have something bold, simple and slightly ambiguous that contained references to both sound and landscapes to both draw the viewer in and give them some sense of the content/themes of the book.