Sketches: The New York Old-Time Radio Schedule Book

From time to time, I'll have the opportunity to work on a book that doesn't have a designated cover photo, because none have been selected, or seem appropriate, or meet the technical requirements — or because there are no illustrations inside the book (which was the case here). That makes more work for me, but it also offers much greater opportunity, and (usually) much more fun. I'll create an interesting or unusual type treatment for a mostly type-driven design (I went with the one on the left), or I'll have some other idea that I think might be made to work. This was a some-other-idea. Here are some sketches (somewhat more sketchier than usual):


My first thought was to use a real, actual newspaper page of radio listings (though I wasn't entirely sure what I would do with it), and somehow go from there — fifteen or twenty minutes of searching, though, made it clear that this might not be so easy to find, after all. (I have a bound volume of The Knickerbocker News from the 1940s — it's really cool! — but this book is a collection of listings from The New York Times, so the stations would all have been wrong.)

Instead, I thought it'd be fun to use a photo of an old radio from stock photgraphy (perhaps even three different ones, since this was a three-volume set of books), and have a series of concentric circles, representing radio waves, emitting from it. The shading of the circles would have a rough texture (and the edges would be defined by that texture), that might have been shaded by hand with a crayon and coquille board, back in the day.

But I decided not to go with stock photography, after all. I couldn't seem to muster up much enthusiasm for having to find three distinct images that would have fit with this design, and I don't think a photo would have worked as well as a stylized drawing (which might have been more difficult to find), anyway. Instead, I made the volume number information the sort of focal point of the concentric circles, and adjusted the type a bit so that everything seems to eminate from that point (or, if nothing else, from that side of the cover).

I had conceived the cover colors as yellows and golds and browns (you can see that in the sketch), a slightly off-white background with golden waves — the black-and-grey background was, really, a happy accident, one of the benefits of working with tools with which you can try just about anything without hesitation.

Another thought was to extend the image of the cover to the spine — instead, I decided to use parts of the same image on the spines of all three books that will (hopefully) form a complete image when side-by-side on a bookshelf.

I say "hopefully," because there's no guarantee that the books will be bound with this kind of precision (I've had issues with this stuff before), but why not try just the same?