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?

Fourth Grade

I don't have much memory of Fourth Grade. I have a somewhat vague recollection of Third Grade (and resentment at having lost a spelling bee), and more substantial memories of Fifth Grade (I prepared a report on the state of Montana), but Fourth Grade remains shrouded in mystery. Even what I think I remember, I'm still not sure of. (I collected Freakies cereral premiums with two friends in my class, and we made gadgets out of big rubber erasers by drawing on them. But wasn't that was still in Third Grade?)

My son started Fourth Grade day before yesterday. He's excited about the new year (though still a bit nervous), and doesn't seem to mourn the loss of his unstructured summer days, not in the way I remember. Not yet, anyway.

Donkey Dollars

Something else discovered while sorting through the stuff in my Father-In-Law's house. There was no date on this, and offhand I thought it might have come from the 1960s — but further research reveals these were distributed during the 1944 Presidential Campaign of Thomas Dewey and John Bricker. (No, I'd never heard of him, either.) I love that quaint reference to "Honest, Full-Value Dollars Under a Republican Administration." This was somehow supposed to represent the declining value of the dollar, but I'm not sure that was so carefully calculated. (In case you're wondering, or want to do the math, it's 2" tall by just under 4" wide.)

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.