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. 

Good Sam and The Birth of Sarcasm

I'm watching Good Sam — Gary Cooper plays man who goes out of his way to do right by everyone who crosses his path, while, inevitably, his family pays the price for his good nature. Reviews refer to this an "almost complete misfire" and a "lifeless comedy" (I couldn't disagree more), and I wonder if that's mostly because the film is a bit dark and it's comedy unusually mean-spirited for a 1948 film (or my notion of a 1948 film, anyway). It's almost a black comedy.

Repeating Myself(Repeating Myself)

I want to keep my design new and novel as I move to different book projects. I'm almost always working with a new Author on each book, and they probably aren't all that aware of other books from the same publisher (much less books I've worked on), so it isn't as though anyone might notice — apart from the publisher, and I think he's just pleased when everything looks good, and is published on time, with a minimum of friction — but still, I think the result is better and more interesting work (if only to me).

That said, though, there are shortcuts and familiar methods I will occasionally fall back on. I got kinda stuck on a particular typeface, recently. At least, it looks that way...




(That's Egiziano Classic Black, for those of you keeping score at home.)

In fact, I just happened to be working on a series of book projects, one after the other after the other, and this just seemed the best-suited type for the design I had in mind. (And then, one more time, because I just liked the shape of the letterforms.)

I almost used it again, this time for the second in a series of similarly-themed script books, but I didn't like the shape of the letterforms (they just didn't seem to work for that title) and I chose something else, instead — though it was certainly similar.


Of course, that cover might also seem somewhat familiar...


In this instance, I had a file already set up for the effect I wanted, and it worked well with what I was trying to get at — why not use it again? I did try various ideas to disguise the similarity, but when all was said and done I decided that, since these are completely different books for a (mostly) completely different audience, I shouldn't lose too much sleep over it. So I just made it darker, a bit more subtle.

And here's this, only because I finished working on it last night...


This time, the type is tilted not only for effect (you might have noticed that's a "familiar method" I occasionally rely on), but because this cover design is type-driven (rather than built around a large, full-cover image), and the word "Westerners" in the title was unusually long, I wanted to find a way to use the title at a large size, despite the narrow width.


...As it happens, the color scheme was taken largely from yet another Western-themed cover I had recently done, drawn from the subtle tones of that beautiful color photo. (But no big ol' slab serif.)

Great Expectations

My son, like virtually every other nine-year-old these days, enjoys playing Angry Birds on the iPad — except when he doesn't. Except when he gets too frustrated by a difficult challenge in the game, and his inability to find a way past it. That's when he comes to me for help. I told him I'd try my best, but that I hadn't spent the hours (or days, or weeks) playing the game that he had, so I couldn't promise I'd succeed. But I'd try.

The first thing he told my wife, when he woke up the next morning, was that I had succeeded in beating this level for him.

These are the expectations set for me. Whenever there's a problem to be solved, Daddy will solve it. A question? Daddy will have the answer. Last minute Halloween costume? Daddy will create it. A broken toy? Daddy will be able to fix it (even when the pieces are strewn all over the kitchen table, and little tiny screws are rolling away in every direction). And he won't give up.

This is all my fault, of course. I haven't set up any expectations I haven't already lived up to. Miracles have (mostly) been worked. In the thinking of a nine-year-old, there is just about nothing I cannot do.

(I never did beat that level for him — not for a lack of trying — but I did explain a strategy for how I thought he might do it. And he succeeded, on his own, within about thirty seconds of trying.)

"She has symptoms of small pox."