Purple Book

I love this book (from 1925), which was stumbled across while sorting through stuff in my Father-In-Law's house. At first, I wasn't sure if that beautiful purple cloth cover was the original, or the result of age — but the spine has become so yellowed that I believe it could be.

Sketches: You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!

I've been working on another book by the author of Just When You Thought It Was Safe: A JAWS Companion (I wrote about the design process for that project here), and the structure of this new book was similar enough that I took this as an opportunity to do something similar with the Design.


Lots of different directions here, for the pages that start off the various section, though I knew I'd only follow through with something that would be easy to implement, given the constraints of the format. I also wanted to find something I could carry over to the cover, more or less — more on that in a moment.



I went simple and bold (there's an additional page for "Film," as well), and that typeface, Berthold City, is used extensively throughout the book.

I'd wanted to do something similar with the cover (I made note of an idea in the lower right corner of the set of thumbnail sketches), but that turned out to be a bit more involved. I had a very clear idea of what I'd intended at the start, so I didn't do more than a quick sketch to work out an idea I'd had about color. I was thinking it might be fun to do the cover predominantly green, not unlike to this book, which was predominantly yellow.

(The original plan was to set the word "Hulk" on the cover in Berthold City, but I didn't like the shape of the letter K. True story. As much as I like about that typeface, there are several aspects of it I don't — I even set the punctuation marks in the title in a different font.)

I think if I'd taken time to think on this a bit longer, and made some additional thumbnails, I probably could have saved myself all kinds of headache. Because when I started setting everything up I realized that using the word "Hulk" as a big design element was going to be trouble. The full title of the book is You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry: A Hulk Companion, and I couldn't find a way to join "A" and "Companion" with that enormous "Hulk."


I thought I might make the word "Hulk" smaller (I didn't want to abandon it), thinking I could find a way to make it fit better as part of the title. But that didn't work, and I never really did solve that problem — not in an ideal way. Instead, I decided to just use the word as a big ol' graphic element, and set "A Hulk Companion" in small type, with the hope that I could find a way to keep the two from interfering with one another. (Why does it say "Hulk" on this cover twice?) I think I've managed that, though it was a process of trial and error.

And there was a great deal of trial, and of error. For whatever reason, I still wasn't completely satisfied with what I was coming up with, so I spent lots and lots (and lots) of time considering alternatives.



(By the way, the various shades of green are brighter and much more vibrant than these JPEG images seem able to demonstrate.)

Even after putting significant effort into it, I still wasn't ready to commit to my initial design, on the left. So I put together another (that's the one on the right), and tried to make everything work. But it really didn't. The word "Hulk" becomes less a graphic element, much more a word, across the center of the cover — when it's on that left edge, you know what it is, but it doesn't "read" the same. That, and there's much too much dead space around the photo on the bottom (which is more vertical), and even around the one on top (which is smaller than it should be in an effort to try to accommodate that photo on the bottom).

I think that second version might be made to work better, somehow, but the more I look at it? That's a cover that anyone could have done. It's just not the kind of cover that I would have done.

There's still something about that photo of Lou Ferrigno, though, that just isn't working for me — it's not that strong a pose, and because of this, it's just not that strong a cover photo. (The makeup seems different from what appeared in the TV series, as well). These are, however, the only two color photos I have. So I quickly put together a third alternative (by that time, it might even have been a fourth), abandoning the second photo altogether.


(I really love that photo, and the idea that it would have had to be painstakingly composed with multiple exposures, back in the day, rather than digitally composited.) That's better, I think, but again, there's that same problem with the redundant word "Hulk," now made much more prominent than ever. I could probably find a way to make it work (and who knows, I may have to, because I haven't submitted any of these designs yet!), but I think I'm going to follow the direction my instincts were taking me before I started doubting them.

(That green stripe that runs down the center, while visually connected to the front cover, is the spine. It's a 500-page book!)

Freehand

I do lots of sketches — I like making sketches early in the design phase of a project, to explore possible solutions to a problem before I start working. I bought an iPad app, Penultimate, because I really like the way it renders pen strokes (it seems to vary the line width a bit based on the speed that the pen is moving, which makes the results seem slightly more organic), and I thought it might be fun to try using that for thumbnails and sketches and whatnot. I also bought a stylus, for more or less the same purpose.

It's a capacitive stylus, though, with a foam tip, a very big and round foam tip, one that doesn't offer a great deal of precision. My favorite writing and drawing pens are nice, new Sharpie markers (they're not as much fun when they're dull), and I'm accustomed to the cause-and-effect of writing and drawing with them. (The Ultra Fine Points are nice for detail, too.) Not so much so with a big round foam tip — I don't have the degree of control I want. I tried this afternoon, and the results were disappointing. (I gave up after about a half-hour, and used good ol' pen and paper, instead.)

I think I want a stylus with a more narrow tip, one that's more like the shape I'm comfortable with. There doesn't seem to be such a thing available, though, which might be a limitation of the technology.

Restart

When you're young, and the whole world seems spread out before you, change can seem exhilarating. Everything is adventure.

But it isn't the same when you're older. It doesn't seem the same, anyway. You might try to disguise it by saying you have responsibilities, or you have people who are depending on you — but what it really is is that you have become comfortable, and change has become difficult and frightening.

I’m in a situation where change seems just about inevitable, and I’m trying to find a way to turn that to my advantage.