Studio Brief 01 - Trial Embossing

In order to deliver a more immersive reading experience to the reader, an idea was brought up to emboss a unique shophouse window in each booklets first page. This will add to the overall tactile feel of the publication, from the feel of the wooden casing, the proposed cloth cover of the booklets, the slightly unrefined grain of the stock and the hand bound stitching. Furthermore the embossing will allow the reader to get a closer look of a shophouse windows characteristics and feel. 

These are thus the intended shophouse designs for each booklet, which are based on the following photographs.

Telok Ayer is not represented by a certain race/culture in Singapore, therefore an area in the shophouse design reserved for tiling will not be needed. 

Joo Chiat shophouse

To get an idea of how well embossing will work on this stock type, some initial embossing was on scrap samples of the stock. Despite having no distinct inside border, each component of the shophouse window is still legible. The design delivered a crisp outline around the shape of the cut out forming a strong emboss for the reader to feel. The registration however was misaligned and compromises the overall quality of the emboss. 

Arab Street window

In order try and achieve a more distinct emboss between the different sections of the cutout, each section was given a separate emboss. This produced a positive result where the overall look of the embossing is definitely made up of a number of sections. The bumps on the windows slats are pronounced, focusing the readers attention to the design of the window. 

To eliminate the need to worry about aligning the sections of the cutout, the paper was not removed from the roller, only the cutouts. The effect is a more accurate representation of what the cutout looks like.