Public Book Project Description

Summary:

The Public Book Project asks students to produce a complete version of a public domain book that contains the following:

  • an original cover design
  • typeset, styled body text

The class will experiment with using public domain and Creative Commons materials, as well as working with AI image generation services, but students should create an original product and avoid violating intellectual property protections including copyright and trademark.

Students' designs will draw inspiration from aesthetic approaches. Final documents will be no less than 20 pages, 5.5" X 8.5" (a common size for paperbacks), and submitted as press-quality .pdf files. Students are encouraged to use Adobe InDesign to produce their public books, which we will cover in class.

We will go through multiple steps with corresponding deliverables to complete the full project, including locating examples of existing book covers to examine their features, generating a corresponding rubric, and analyzing format traits.

 

Deliverables:

  • Book Research (5 points)
  • Book Design Plan (5 points)
  • Book Final (50 points)
  • Materials Analysis (10 points)
  • Postmortem (5 points)

 

Resources: