The Project Brief
Can we remove the image from our work?
Objective
How can we remove the image from our work? How vital is a visual to communication, are visuals always created by our eyes? This project will explore how we can communicate and experience imagery without the use of our eyes. This will be see in the concept of a book of images meant to be read with your hands, not your eyes.
Audience
The audience of this project will be people with vision impairments, book lovers, people who appreciate photography, experimental designers, and people with disposable income that are interested in books.
Specific Goals
Find a way to capture emotion with texture, produce a high quality binding, and develop a process for intriguing unique textures on pages.
Process
Creating a book meant to be experienced without your eyes was new territory to me. I researched up on how people with visual impairments access books. Besides the use of Braille type to translate books, Tactile Books are books filled with 3d forms and textures to teach more complex concepts.
The plan was to bring textural scans to life in the book. So I took scans I had of street art from Europe and applied a threshold to them to make screen printing with them simpler. To emboss the images and apply texture I used embossing powder and activated it with a heat gun. The screenprinting was necessary to lay ink for the powder to stick to.
