Sketches: Little Elf

Sadly, none of the covers in is post will likely see print (though who knows, if the opportunity comes up, I hope to be able to use one of the concepts again). I say "sadly" not because my work on this won't be used — woe is me. — but because when I put a great deal of time and effort into a project, I feel as though I take part ownership (if only a very, very small part), and I want to see it have the very best chance at success. That time-worn adage about a book's cover, there may be some small truth to it -- but it's the cover that, more often than not, intrigues you enough to take the opportunity to judge the book.

In an era where most books are sold via a web browser, and the most you'll see of them before you open the box is a small image of the cover, that cover carries an enormous weight — even more so, I think, than the days when you were able to page through a book to get a general sense of it. And when you have a paperback book that's going to retail for $50 (!), even if it is almost 700 pages, I think that burden becomes even greater.

I say "sadly," because I think if you could see the cover that will be used, who knows, you might be inclined to agree that it falls short in that very basic function. Granted, design can be very subjective, and it's just about a given that not everyone will agree, but the publisher and I pushed for something better — not because we're sure we know better, only because we both wanted the best possible package for this product.

I don't want to get stuck on the politics of all this (and I wouldn't feel entirely comfortable getting into even constructive criticism of someone else's work here), but I did want to make the point (because it came up in the discussions) that none of this was about "ego." I'm proud of my work, of course, but humble enough to know I'm often just as fortunate to have all the pieces come together, as I am skilled. (And they often don't come together without a great deal of trial and error.)

These sketches were put together as an alternative to another cover design, so I was approaching this project with, I guess, somewhat more restrained goals. I felt it might be best to keep the design simple, and the structure reasonably similar to what had already been suggested. But I wanted to make the type more legible and better-thought-out, while still keeping with the era of the book's subject.
I used Cooper Black (hey look, it has it's own Wikipedia page!), which I had also selected for the interior design pages, because it reads well, it's of the era, and it's easy to tinker with to give it a slightly more uneven, hand-drawn quality. (Similar hand-drawn lettering was used on many posters and trade ads in the book. Beautiful stuff.) The other cover had used type that was a shorthand, almost a cliché of type use of the 1920s, and I felt this was among the weakest aspects of the design.

Granted, not everyone would recognize that, because a cliché only becomes a cliché only after people rely on it so much you begin to see it everywhere — but still, I wanted to try for something better. (Type is an acquired skill.)

I did those "safe" versions (with a variation, based on the gold colors used in the original design), and what I referred to as a "far-fetched" version. It was a concept that almost didn't make it past the sketch stage, but I was intrigued by the idea, and wanted to see if I could make it work. I took the opportunity to be a bit more playful with the title, and especially that photo — I like how it draws your attention right to those eyes, that face. I was hesitant because I was afraid this might be too much of an unusual approach for the subject matter, and for the type of reader likely to be interested in a book like this. But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

(Honestly, it's difficult to imagine another opportunity for me to use this concept — it'd have to be just the right combination of title, image, and subject matter. But at least I can still use it here.)

Sketches: The Hollywood Canteen

Sometimes, you have what you think could be a good idea, but it takes more effort than you expected to get to “there.”


I did a few sketchier-than-usual sketches for this book on my iPad. I have a stylus, and I like it a lot, as styluses (styli?) go, but I still miss the control and precision I get with pen and paper (even with a big ol’ Sharpie marker). This point in the process is (or should be) one of discovery, of taking ideas out of my head and putting them into a form that I can follow through on — but I felt like the lack of control in what I was drawing was a big, big distraction. Maybe I should loosen up and learn to embrace that. I dunno, maybe I will.

Had a thought about using the title as a sort of “dividing” element between two photos, but gave up on that when I found the perfect photo. Or, almost the perfect photo. There was another, of a short dumpling of a man in uniform with a comical expression of delight on his face, in a slow dance with a beautiful woman who was at least a foot taller than he was. (Her hair was swept up, it was difficult to be sure.) And you probably wouldn’t have recognized the actress.

No mistaking pin-up girl Rita Hayworth, though, on a crowded dance floor filled with servicemen. There couldn’t have been a better cover photo for this book.

As you can see from the sketches, I had wanted to put the subhed between the two parts of the title, to use that space better. (There’s always the concern that it will be read as “Title-Subhed-Title” instead of “Title-Subhed,” but it can work, and anyway, I wanted to try it.) That turned out to be much more difficult that I had anticipated, trying to balance the way everything fit together with the size of the elements — I didn’t want the book title to be too big, but I didn’t want the subhed to be too small — et cetera, et cetera. So much so that I just gave up on the idea at first.



(I tried a variation on that photo tinted dark blue, too, but the highlights on Rita Hayworth were so bright that the contrast made them look too hard.)

But I got kinda stubborn, and when I came back to this, I decided, y’know, there ought to be a way to make this work. And that took a few further adjustments (there’s another version of this version that had the subhed overlap the word “Hollywood” differently, but that didn’t seem as legible), but I think I finally have everything sorted out. Except for the back cover, which isn’t finished yet.

Different

"I noticed something is different about the Aspire kids."

That's a specialized program in our school district for children on the Autism spectrum. My son started Kindergarten as part of Aspire, but by First Grade he was spending more and more of his day in a mainstream class — with an aide, at first — an arrangement that continues for his peers that continue to be part of that program. (He's now in Fourth Grade, in a mainstream class, without an aide, and will probably be officially "declassified" as a Special Ed student after this year.)

We explained that they're part of that program because of Autism. We tried — and failed, I think — to give him a good sense of what that means, but we were both taken by surprise by the comment, and it was all we could manage to stumble through an explanation that Autism could be so many different kinds of behaviors in different people -- like the different friends he knows. But mostly, I told him, that just means your brain works a bit differently.

I'm not sure if he understands that he was part of the Aspire program. That's how he knows these kids so well, of course, and a few of them have continued to be his friends, but I don't know if he was aware that he was part of a separate program — as far as he was concerned, it was just "school."

And I'm not sure if he understands that he is Autistic. His peers in the Aspire program are so very different from him (he has been the only student from his class to effectively leave the program), and he hasn't yet made the connection.

We didn't tell him, though perhaps an opportunity presented itself here. Should we have? I honestly don't know. I think I'd like for him to put these pieces together for himself, so we can talk about this when he's ready.

My son is becoming increasingly aware of himself. It's exciting and wonderful, but in that way that can leave you completely unsettled as you think back upon your own difficult adolescence.

Stuck inside of Mobi with the Memphis Blues Again (or Waist Deep in the Kindle Muddy)

At this age, I find when I'm learning something new, when I'm still trying to process it and maybe struggling to understand it all, whetever it is begins to make it's way into my dreams. My brain continues working on the problem even after my attention has wandered elsewhere (or surrendered to fatigue).

I still haven’t completely embraced reading eBooks, despite my enthusiasm, but that’s only because I just haven’t been able to make the time to read anything as long as a book. I’ve been avoiding building — or in my case, learning to build — an eBook for more or less the same reason, and because it seems to be more about the “building” than it is the “designing.” But you oughta start somewhere, as they say.

I work with a small (very small) publisher who has been distributing his books to Amazon’s Kindle platform primarily in PDF format, and while he’s been keen to publish more native-format eBooks, his experiences having them produced have fallen somewhere between “poor” and “a complete disaster.” So I offered to transition a few of the print books I’d put together for him into Kindle format, for a more-modest-than-usual-fee, to get the learning curve started.

There’s a reasonably simple mechanism — not foolproof, and not without it’s shortcomings — but a way to create ePub files from InDesign, and from there into the Kindle (or mobi) format. (There’s a mechanism to skip that step and go straight to Kindle format, as well, but I want to have more control over the finished product. Sort of.)

Sort of. I’ve discovered, through trial and error (mostly error), that simplification is key. Much of what I like to do with a print book cannot be duplicated in an eBook — or, at least, cannot be duplicated easily — so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth to try. As a book designer, this takes some getting used to.

I can’t get too ambitious with some of the projects I work on (many are simple, black-and-white, print on demand books), but when I can, I like to try to have fun with the book format — I’ll occasionally design Chapter Breaks to be a bit more like a magazine than a book, or use the time it takes to physically turn a page (between Half-Title and Title Page, for example) for effect. But none of that really applies to a book read on a device. The learning curve has proven to be an occasionally frustrating exercise in learning limits.

And different devices handle different files in different ways (that’s what I’m led to understand, at any rate), so there isn’t necessarily any guarantee that what looks nifty on one device will look equally nifty on another.

Add to that, I’m constructing these books primarily for the Kindle format. That now encompasses a range of different devices, but Amazon remains stubbornly fixed on a proprietary file format that offers only the most basic options for text display on most of them. (Limited font sizes. Wait, that’s supposed to be bold? No small caps. No right-hand indents, not-really-reliable left-hand indents.) I kinda feel obligated to make sure everything works for those basic devices, and that means even my ePub files have to be simplified to sort of a lowest common denominator. Even that takes more time than you might expect.

(I tried using code that would coerce different devices to display the same book differently, but it hasn’t worked, and with Amazon's standards not entirely set, it’s just not worth the pursuit.)

The challenge now, having learned everything-I-can’t-really-do-and-shouldn’t-bother-trying, is to set up a workflow that will enable me to construct these as an add-on to the process I already employ.

Sketches: The Bewitched History Book

What do you do with a title like The Omni-Directional Three-Dimensional Vectoring Paper Printed Omnibus? If you think you can get away with it, why, you more or less ignore it when it isn't convenient! And have fun with it when you can, of course.

So I didn't use it on the page headers, or on the spine (though with the book coming in at 700-plus pages, there was certainly more room than usual), but I thought it'd be fun to use it on the cover, to set the tone for the book. (That, and I thought doing something a bit different might help to set the book apart from, you know, the several hundred other books on Bewitched that have been published through the years.)


First thought was to essentially divide the cover in half, and have that first part of the title as a sort run-on sentence — not without spaces or punctuation, but as though it were being said without taking a breath — with the "real" title on the bottom, and a cartoon figure of Samantha (from the familiar opening credits) zipping by as a dividing line. But the title has so many long words that it fitting them all comfortably into a paragraph with the structure I wanted at a large size became kinda difficult. I never could find a way to make it work the way I wanted to.

So I gave up on that, and set up the words as a list, instead. (I had a notion to put the words "The" and "A.K.A" in circles, to liven up the design a bit, but in the end I felt that would attract more attention to them than was warranted.)

(That would have been a cartoon figure of Darrin from the opening titles to the left of the book title, but when all was said and done, it didn't seem necessary. I thought about moving that image to the back cover, but it ended up much more difficult to get a reasonable color image from a screen capture for the cartoon Samantha than I had expected, and not wanting to go through that all over again, I kinda gave up on the idea.)


I like white covers — I think they're unusual and draw more attention to a book because of it. But I thought that white Bewitched logo on the blue background would be more familiar, and more quickly recognized. (And no, that isn't the actual logo, just something similar I set in type.) That, and all those twinkly stars — another iconic part of the opening credits — just didn't read well against a white background. (And yes, I know, the stars are actually white in the opening credits, but I prefer yellow.)

Web colors are doing a disservice to that blue — it's a bit less flat than what I see here. (I might need to adjust it a bit.)


(By the way, the Author tells me that the inspiration for the title came from a contraption that Dr. Bombay called "The Omni-Directional Three-Dimensional Vectoring Cadmium-Shielded Computer for Location Analysis.")

Why yes, as a matter of fact I did just order a new iPad.

We're going to do the iPad shuffle (heh!) here — the Family iPad will be traded in, and my current iPad 2 will become the new Family iPad. (If you've ever seen what the screen of a touch-based device looks like after it's been used by a nine-year-old, you'll probably understand why we have a Family iPad, and I have mine.)

I kinda sorta need to have the new iPad for development purposes, to update my app for the new higher-resolution display (I'm not sure I'll even be able to submit a new version of the app if I don't do so), but I also do a great deal of reading with mine — in fact, I use it for that purpose far more than anything else — so the improved display was the real attraction here.

Unfortunately, I'm going to lose out on having a first-generation iPad as a test device for development, but every bit helps offset the cost of the new model. Of the various trade-in offers available — which are probably somewhat less lucrative now than they had been a few days ago — I went with the slightly lower, but familiar and reliable Gazelle.com. Once again, eBay was offering a bit more, but not enough to overcome my uneasiness and skepticism. (Peace of mind is worth the $75.)

Thankfully, this year you can pre-order, and avoid waiting in line for several hours.

Happy Birthday!

It's Guy Kibbee's birthday today! (That's him on the right, with one of my favorite character actors from that era, Aline MacMahon, in Gold Diggers of 1933.) To celebrate, TCM has scheduled virtually the entire day devoted to his work, including several pre-code films I've not yet seen.