Studio Brief 1: Braille Book Development

Following on from the final crit, I wanted to think about the various ways I could emboss the braille in my publication. As I did not have time to build individual embossing plates for each of the pages using the laser cutter, I needed to think of a way to do this manually. 

I thought I may be able to create the braille effect if it were printed onto thick stock such as card and then pushed through using a lightbox and small circular stencil. Again, due to time issues, I had to create my own make-shif light box at home. In order for this to work I needed a torch, plastic container, stencil and thin object to apply the pressure with - in this case, the end of a paintbrush. 

When I had designed the braille pages, I had defined the raised dots through a full opacity, and lowered the unused dots to 25% opacity. This made things a lot easier when identifying which braille dots needed to be raised. This was not the most ideal method to get the braille effect, but I was surprised by the result. As I had printed the design onto a thick card, it was easy to apply pressure without tearing the card easily. However it was difficult to maintain a consistent amount of pressure across the whole four pages of braille. This meant that some dots were more defined than others. As the dots were then inconsistent, I knew I wanted to find another way to achieve the raised dots.

Below are a couple of images of the dots after they had been raised. These experiments were carried out on black and white versions of the publication for cost reasons. 

After returning to these pages the next day, I discovered that the printed ink from the raised dots had rubbed off onto the pages facing them. The result looked smudged and untidy, although the pages were poorly produced. Although these smudges were reasonably easy to remove with an eraser, I was aware the same issue would have happened every time the publication was closed for a period of time. 

During a discussion with Simon, I explained the issues I was having with the braille dots to see what he could recommend. He mentioned that one of the First Year's had produced something similar recently where they had applied a matte laminate finish to the pages. He suggested that this could be a good way to prevent the pages from smudging and it would also protect the braille from fading over time.

Simon also liked the way the inverted braille looked on the reverse of the card. He suggested maybe not including the printed dots at all and experimenting with just raising the dots to see what the outcome would look like. This was useful as I hadn't been sure about the inverted braille. My first thoughts were that it looks slightly untidy and home made (although it was).

After the discussion with Simon, it was really just a case of my making a few important decisions:
- What aesthetic did I want to go for? - handmade or professional?
- Would the braille work better as embossing alone or did it need to be printed as well for extra clarity?
- How was I going to ensure that the braille was not damaged or flattened over time?
- Was embossing the best method, or was there a more appropriate approach which would support my intentions better.

As my target audience for this project was specifically people who could see, learning how to communicate with partially impaired people who could only see through reading braille, I wanted to keep the publication as visually engaging as possible. This cancelled out the idea of simply embossing with no printed version of the dots. I really wanted to shine a new light on braille, raising awareness for the minimal elegance of it visually as well as its highly intelligent power of communication.

My next idea was to experiment with sticking raised objects onto the card. For the first experiment, I used a selection of three different stock choices: coloured paper, watercolour paper, and black card. I placed these all onto the same page so I was able to compare them against one another once stuck down to the card. I was hoping that the coloured paper would be effective enough because I would then be able to use a variety of colours as I had done when I designed the publication. I created the dots using a hole punch as this was almost the exact size dots I was working with.

Once all the dots were in place, I took the page to the library where I was able to laminate it myself (saving money).  I asked for advice about the best settings and how to use the laser cutter to give myself the most chance of the emboss effect working. They recommended putting the heat up to the highest setting and experimenting with the laminator as usual. 

The results were more successful than I had expected. Although the braille was slightly raised, I wasn't completely satisfied. When the card was put through the laminator, the raised dots were squashed slightly, leaving an imprint/ very slight embossed effect on the reverse of the page. I wondered if this would work more effectively on a thicker stock.

In order to get a better idea of the most effective stock choice, I arranged four separate braille experiments into the laminating pouch: one with coloured paper on a single sheet of card, braille on two sheets of card and the same on two samples of watercolour paper - the thickest stock I could find that would successfully go through the laminating machine. 

The outcomes were all reasonably similar. The braille was successful raised in each variation, however the most effective was the double-layered watercolour paper with the coloured paper dots.

After getting the opinion of a few of my peers, I went ahead with the idea of printing my whole publication onto watercolour paper. I was already intending to manually stick my pages back to back with one another because of my original method of producing the braille. I also made a few changes to my publication such as removing the underlining of the page headings as this just seemed to clutter the pages. I also reduced the size of the page numbers and changed them to the same American Typewriter font to keep it consistent with the rest of the publication texts. This gave the publication a more simplistic outcome and allowed for more attention and focus on the braille itself.

In order to create the braille dots, I carried out the same process of cutting the coloured paper out using a hole punch. I chose to do a range of colours: red, orange and yellow. This was to make the publication more visual engaging, create a bit of variety, but also due to what the colours meant in psychological terms. 

The purpose of using this publication was for people who could see, to learn the basics of braille and then use it to communicate with their loved ones who used this as their only method of communication. For this reason, I chose to use warm colours. In psychological terms, red is used to communicate love and passion. Orange represents creativity and imagination. And finally yellow symbolises happiness and good intention. This process is relevant to the process of learning and producing the braille. It would take passion to want to learn it, creativity to go about making actually it, resulting in making someone else happy.  

I printed the braille alphabet, numbers and punctuation pages out without the dots. During my development I decided it was no necessary to include the dots of each cell which weren't to be used, and simply focus on the ones which should. This in theory would help learners to get a better visual idea of how the braille would look once completed. 

Using prit-stick glue and tweezers, I was able to position the braille in place exactly where I wanted. This was a very time-consuming process, but it gave me the chance to actually begin to learn a bit of braille myself. The trickiest part of this process was the alignment of the braille. As I could not draw on these final pages, I had to line each individual letter up with the previous ones using a ruler. This meant that some of the braille cells were not entirely accurate, but I got them as close as I could. I wanted to ensure each letter was as clear as possible. 

Once I got into the process, the pages really started to come together.

Below: With certain letters (particularly the first ones in each row) I had to place all 6 braille dots down to get a better idea of alignment. Doing this made it much easier to visualise where each dot I needed should go. As I had no form of template other than on-screen reference at this point, this was a useful alternative and worked effectively.

Once all of the braille was securely in place, I needed to stick the pages together and laminate them as soon as possible before the glue became less sticky and there was risk of the dots falling off. 

The big bonus of the lamination was the guaranteed secureness of the braille for a considerably long period of time. As the braille was to be felt time and time again, it needed to be robust and secure. I thought this was an ideal solution, although it would have been great to have a chance experimenting with a proper embossing process - this is something I would definitely try if I were to do the project again.

In order to keep the presentation as consistent as possible, I decided it would be best to laminate the whole publication. The only downside of this was its heavy feel and it was not instantly understandable why the book was laminated until discovering the braille pages. These are all elements I have taken into account for future production methods. Considering this was my first time ever trying something like this, I was really pleased with the result.