In continuation of the “location:animated gifs”, in GDES III, we were to decide if whether or not we wanted to see our gif concept through to book form. For me, I didn’t feel confident about the overgrowth vegetation, and a theme that I was going to put to it. Therefore I changed my idea about what I wanted my book concept to be. At the time of this project, it was in the ending of October-starting of November, so because of that I had remembered that Austin holds a great Dia de Los Muertos in which the hispanic culture comes together to celebrate their loved ones whom have passed. This is also a holiday that is dear to me, since I am a Mexican-American woman, I celebrate this festival at home with my family.

Therefore, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to showcase the holiday, and to put out a book about this magnificent holiday, so that people who are unfamiliar with the traditions, could read all about them. For my book, I really wanted to showcase what this holiday has to offer, in bright detailed HD photos. I wanted minimal text to contrast with a large eye-catching image next to it. I also wanted the images to take up almost the entire landscape of my book, crossing over unto the next page. In conjunction with the images and text, I wanted to add illustrations of my own into the mix. I thought it would be a nice balance of having the different medias together. I illustrated the book cover, inside pages, and skull vectors that are seen throughout the book. The sugar skull is an art form that I am fascinated with, and also paint in my free time. This was one of my favorite projects because I enjoyed everything from my concept, to the process, to the result of my book. The one aspect that allowed me to really push my own design was the fact that we were given full autonomy over our design decisions. Having no strict guidelines with this project, really let me experiment and have fun creating a book. In the end, I also printed and bound my book on paper I purchased and printed them on my own.