Transcripts
1. Introduction: You don't need to know what a design is going to look like when you set pen to paper. I think the thing that really intimidates us is we feel like we need to know what it's going to look like before we start, but it's really just about walking through a process and letting the design emerge as you work. Hi. My name is Jessica Hische, and I'm a lettering artist, illustrator, and author from San Francisco, California. In this class, we're going to be designing book covers together and learning so much more along the way. So, throughout this class, what we're going to do is we're going to talk through a lot of these early stages of working on a book cover design. We're going to start with research and talk about why it's important to actually read the content. Oh hello. We're going to move on to brainstorming, figuring out all the different concepts that you can call from it. Then, we're going to talk about sketching layout and dealing with complex typographical hierarchies. By the very end of this class, what we're going to have is just really good color sketches of different directions that you could take a cover. These would be fully presentable to a client. Choose a book cover or a book that you really want to redo the cover of, whether it's one of your favorite books or a favorite book of a friend or family member, and we're going to work to redo that cover. I think one of the best things that you can do is choose a cover that doesn't already have a very typographical or highly lettered cover, and think about making the typographical version of that book. I'm really excited to have you guys here with me today. So, let's get started on our project.
2. Choosing Your Book: I'm really passionate about book covers as being an amazing design exercise, because reading is something that, hopefully, we all grew up having a real relationship with. I think, there's a lot of talk about content first design, and actually making sure that the content comes through in your design concepts. I think in very few cases is it as clear as it is with book cover design. Because ultimately, if the cover doesn't represent the content of the interior of the book, you have fully failed. You can't really take this as a vanity exercise, in which you just make a design that you feel like making that has nothing to do with the interior of the book. Because what you're going to do is, you're going to alienate the reader or you're going to pissed the reader off, and they're going to get very upset that you misled them from even the very start. The journey that they had been on for eight hours, 12 hours, 15 hours, wasn't really represented well in terms of their first introduction to the book. One of the things that is so wonderful about book cover design is that, there's no expectation that you're going to get everything into that design. You just have to let people in. You have to give people an understanding about what they're about to encounter. Once they have encountered it, once they've lived through it, give them a thing to look back on, and actually really feel like they've experienced that thing whole. So, one thing that I would suggest when you're choosing your own book that you want to redo the cover for, is to choose something that's not a single word title. Something that has at least two or three different words that you can have some typographical hierarchy, so that you can really use all the skills that we're going to be talking about in this class. I'm going to be doing a cover for the Wizard of Oz, but not for the Wizard of Oz and book, which is much stranger, but for the novelization of the original 1939 film. One of the reasons why I chose it is because there really is so much to work with. This is something that is a very beloved story, and it's something that has a lot of visual things that we can be illustrating, that we can be referencing. There's a lot of color involved, there's just so many different touch points. So, it just seems like a very rich place to work from, in terms of coming up with multiple concepts. You're going to find that certain books are a lot easier to work with than others. If there's something that you can think of that immediately starts getting your engines firing in terms of different visualizations that you have or had from reading that book, that's going to be something that would be a good start, if you're feeling a little intimidated about what to do. If you want to challenge yourself picking something that is a little harder to get into, or is a little less plot driven, a little bit more specific about detail, and motifs, and symbolism, that's going to be something that's going to be more challenging, but ultimately might end up making a really interesting cover. One of the things that I would keep in mind when you're choosing your book, if it's something that you have already read, it's going to be a lot easier to get started. Maybe it's a book from your childhood that you haven't read since you were 11, but could read now as an adult and have a totally different framework and context for it. I think, actually, working from a place of familiarity is always going to be something that gets the ball rolling, and then you can examine that content through a new lens of being someone that really needs to absorb it, versus when you were reading it at first for pleasure or for school. One of the things that I think is really important before starting any design project at all is to not start with visual research. Do not start by looking up every cover that has ever been done for the Wizard of Oz, or any cover that has ever been done for any of the books that you're planning on doing. I think that, that visual research can really limit us in terms of where we let our brains go, in terms of what we feel like what's appropriate for the cover, and it's important to look at that later but not in this initial stage. So, what I would say to you is, if any of you are planning to also do the Wizard of Oz with me, because it's a really fun project, that do not skip ahead to the brainstorming video yet. We'll talk through the process of brainstorming before I actually do the brainstorming. Just try to pause and do it on your own before listening to the things that I came up with. Because I want you to come up with your own really cool bizarre things for the book. All right. So, before we move into research and brainstorming, I want you guys to pick your book so we're ready to get started.
3. Reading as Research: Hello. I'm just doing one of the most important parts about, creating a book cover, which is doing the research itself. One of the things, that's super fine about book covers, is getting paid to read books, which can be very stressful if you're a slow reader like myself, but you guys can do this class, at your own pace. So, you can just take all the time that you need, to read your book. Reading for pleasure is very different than reading while doing a book cover. So, when you're reading for pleasure you're not thinking, let me highlight all of these weird, mundane details going on in a book. Let me write down, like what I'm thinking of, in that moment, or whatever. Maybe you are, maybe you're the kind of person that has like insane highlights going on on their Kindle. I'm generally not that person, because I'm just immersed in the book. So, what you're going to do, if you read on a Kindle, great, because you can highlight a note to your heart's content. But at the same time, I actually feel like it's really handy, to just keep a really simple sheet of paper nearby to just write down things, as you encounter them. They should be stuff that is as high level as, you know, the more expected plot points, that you would expect to see on a book cover, and as low-level as like, the pattern on a curtain, or the way a certain scene felt. Things that can be very very abstract that you might be able to pull into the cover later. Things that feel important to you, might not be actually important in the book, or things that, you know, these sort of like visual things, that stick out to you, might have nothing to do with, like the overall big picture of the book. But they can be really good ways to add like little nuanced moments on a cover, or throughout interior illustrations. I play it pretty fast and loose when it comes to taking notes while I'm reading. I'm not someone that has, like a very organized life, in general as much it might appear that way sometimes through my exercises and organization. But to me, it's just about making sure that I have some way to access those notes later, and actually, I find that personally the more disorganized my notes are, the better, because if I have them all very much arranged by chapter, able to be referenced in the future. Suddenly, I start having less of this sort of like, a mavic pool of information to pull from, which can lead to very interesting results, and have more of very specific linear timeline of things that happened in the book, which to me doesn't tend to spark as much stuff, as this sort of like, messy page of random notes. Certainly, do whatever allows you to immerse yourself in the material, because it's really important to just get a really good overall sense of, how this book feels, what the characters are like, what the setting is like, what sort of mood the book has and portrays, because if you can't get that in one shot, when you're looking at the cover, then you've really failed. I find it very important to read at least a third of the book, in order to absorb as much of the sort of general setting, and mood as you can. When you're reading summaries of books, you can get a lot of details in, but you can't actually really get a feel for the book in the same way that you can when you're reading it. So, I think that in that way, reading and sites like SparkNotes can really work together. Don't immediately go to SparkNotes or immediately go to a literature summarization site, in order to sort of, go through all the breakdowns of the characters in the plots, and the motifs, and the symbolism. Try to get as much of that, on your own first, and then use that as a supplement, once you've already done your research. Again, this is very similar to the visual research end of it. If you're bringing that too early in the process, you limit yourself. So you wanted to be a part of the process, but not before you've allowed your brain, to sort of work on its own, without the context of other people's opinions, and other people's writing, and visualizations. So, now I'm going to get into doing my brainstorming, for my book cover, which I do entirely verbally. I'm a verbal brainstormer, which I think allows me, to sort of, bring in as much wacky ideas as possible. If I went immediately to visual, I would get some visualization in my head, and then immediately feel like that was the only solution for the cover. I just tend to do word association lists. I write down anything that comes to mind. I take the notes that I took while I was reading the book, or in this case, while I was watching a movie. I'll actually sort of, make them into the most complete list and fleshed out list as I can. This, I usually do over the course of just one or two sessions. I might start a list in my notebook, or I might start on a piece of paper and sort of keep it close by. Then, if something randomly pops into my head, I can add it to that list. But, I think it's just really nice to just let your brain, just sort of dump on the page. So, if any of you guys are doing, The Wizard of Oz as well, take a pause right now, do this, do not watch the next segments, so that you can really let your brain go wild, and not be influenced by the things that I'm going to write down.
4. Establish Your Audience: So, now that we've done a lot of our verbal brainstorming, and I've gotten a lot of hours, just sort of like the stuff that was floating around in our head as we absorb the content out and onto paper, it is a little bit safe to actually go in and do a bit of visual brainstorming and visual research, and one of those things that it's going to be important about is when you're thinking about your audience. So, the reason why I would say it's okay to go look at other examples of books when it comes to audience is that, when you're trying to hit a certain audience, they're used to seeing things a certain way. If you think about how huge of an impact like those Malcolm Gladwell books had on just the design of pop psychology books, it's pretty crazy. There's sort of like a before and after Malcolm Gladwell period, where now, if you see a book that's entirely white that has typeset serif type on the cover with a small spot illustration, you immediately know the genre of writing that that book is going to try to hit, and that happens with business books, it happens with literature, and it certainly happens with romance novels. There is this visual language that ends up becoming very dominant within certain genres, and it's impossible to ignore it because it's a really easy way to immediately hit that audience, and immediately grab someone based on the work that they've previously seen. One of the best things that you can do is just spend some time in a bookstore, go through all the different sections and see if you can spot trends just as you're walking through it. If you're seeing things pop out in terms of the design trends or the tropes that you see people using within the design, the different kinds of types styles, the color palettes, things like that, and just really try to internalize that and see what you can do to either align your work to that if you want to make sure that on first glance, that book is recognizable as being within that genre or totally bucket if you want to make sure that it doesn't get lost in a sea of books that are too similar. So, to make a successful book cover, you really have to be thinking about who you want to ultimately buy this book. Who do you want this book to be given to as a gift? What's going to make this book immediately visually appealing to them? So, really considering the audience is an important part of that. One of the things that you could think about, especially if you're designing a book cover for a classic book is, what are you doing that's new and interesting? What new audience are you trying to reach with that book? With the leather-bound classics that I've made for Barnes & Noble, it is about reaching a new audience but it's more so about making a really beautiful gift version of that book, so that as a person that's very familiar with the book already will buy it, either for themselves or to give to someone else to introduce them to the text. Penguin has done other versions of these classic reissues by making covers that look like graphic novels, so that they can bring a graphic novel audience to these classic texts, because they're so used to seeing and excited about the visual language of graphic novels that it can be a way to clue them in and get them involved in a book that they might have not necessarily picked up in the first place. When it comes to Wizard of Oz, I could design an entire Wizard of Oz book that's meant to be for children, since the movie version of The Wizard of Oz is a bit more kid-friendly than the actual original book version. So, maybe I want to do some brainstorming about what makes a book visually appealing to children, or maybe I want it to be all about female empowerment, and the fact that Dorothy was so strong, even though she was clearly meant to portray a young girl and a very naive girl. So, maybe, it's all about this early understanding of female power and how to balance out femininity with power. One of the other things to think about when it comes to audience is whether you're going to lean masculine, feminine or gender neutral, I think one of the things that everybody tries to do in this day and age is to be as gender inclusive as possible, but at the same time, there are going to be texts that are going to be more geared towards women or more geared towards men, and you can clue into that visually. So, it's important that you're not being too stereotypical with your design, and that you're being as gender inclusive as possible, but I think there's nothing wrong with knowing that a book that you're designing a cover for is going to have a massive impact on a young girl if they're given it, and therefore, appealing to her is really important, and that you can do so by working with the visual language that other people in the past have worked with as long as it doesn't alienate anyone, and as long as it doesn't actually do anything that's anti-feminist or anti-female. Same thing with men. There's certainly a path that you can take that is toxic, and weird, and wrong, and hyper stereotypical or there's a path that you can do where you make sure that a man that walks into a bookstore is going to feel that this book feels like it can exist in their life that they lead, and I think that you can design either way, something that can find a very, very specific audience or something that is more broad, and it really just depends on what kind of audience that you're after. So, when it comes to dealing with trendiness and design, I think what you have to really play with is, if following a trend actually helps your book and helps put it in the sphere of these other books that are really popular or if it actually just makes your book lost in a sea of other things. So, I think that what you really want to make sure of is that the book actually can find its audience, and if you're too on trend or too invisible within a world of a trend, the risk is that the book won't find its audience because it'll just be lost on the bookshelf among all these other books. So, that's just always something to be conscious of. You can buck the trend and do something totally different, but you can also run the risk of making something that someone sees and does not perceive as being applicable to them because it doesn't follow within the same footprint of a lot of the other books that they've seen. This happens over and over again, especially with business and finance books, if it doesn't look like a business finance book, people are going to be less likely to pick it up. There is like a fiction look and a nonfiction look, and once you actually get into bookstores and start looking at different book covers, you're going to understand this. So, I'm going to go ahead and come up with some different scenarios of who I could be designing this book cover for. So, one of the things that you can think about in terms of finding your audience, is actually where will this book end up? Which isn't always in a bookstore. So, what I can just start doing is just write down places where people buy books, and like maybe that will actually help determine one of the places where I can figure out how to find my audience. So, certainly independent bookstores. But something like anthropology or one of these stores where they sell beautiful object books is something that you can think about. Another place would be museums. Is there a Wizard of Oz in museum? Is there a museum dedicated to the author that you're making your book about? Another thing would be a very specific event, like thinking about a celebration of the 60th year since something has come out, would there be an event surrounding that? That you would design something where it could be a little bit more of a keep sake versus something that needs to jump out on a bookshelf. When you're thinking about things like that, special edition, special events, things that are going to be marketed specifically as a limited edition, super high-end, that kind of thing, that can also help you figure out your audience because your audience for someone that's buying a box, the leather-bound edition set, it's going to be very different than an audience that's buying for fun, for children paperback version. So, from this, we can gather a few different kind of audiences that we have. If we think about a children's bookstore, obviously, there's for kids, and what are some things that we think about with kids? Brighter colors, simple more straightforward typographical design. Kids aren't necessarily going to be able to read a really complicated script, and I know not all adults can also. Also, really heavy on the illustration. I think if you're going to make something that's for kids, having it be very illustrative and very visual, it's going to really make a lot of sense for that audience. So, we were thinking about doing something for more of a limited edition box set, the rules would be very different. When I think about a limited edition box set, I'm thinking about something that has to look expensive. To make something look expensive, it can go one of two ways, super minimalist, which can look very expensive, or very ornate, which can look very expensive. In terms of the work that I do, I would tend to lean more ornate than minimalist, but either could work. Minimalist works really well if you're using crazy production methods, like if you're using some very high-end letter pressy kind of thing, but if you're talking about just printing a basic cover, I would tend to lean more ornate, so I'm going to write ornates, lots of ornaments, more subtle illustration, having it be more complex typographically versus simple typographically, having a high-end production value, so something like using multiple foils or using some sort of embasing, something like that. That's not something that I need to do in my sketch or need to show in my sketch, but I can talk about it as I'm presenting my sketches. A limited or sophisticated color palette versus something that's really bright and fun, or something actually that's really unexpected in terms of color palette, using two really muted colors than one really bright color. One of the other places you can really think about these books ended up, which I listed, are these specialty stores like anthropology or Urban Outfitters which have very different audiences. So, if I wanted to think about anthropology, who shops an anthropology? It's a lot of young women, it's a lot of women in their 20s and 30s and 40s, and so, what does that mean to design a cover that I'm trying to appeal to that person, to that shopper? So, maybe, that's our cover that we would do that is about harnessing this like female power of Dorothy, which really opens me up to being able to use scripts and things like that, that I might not have been able to use for a kids book or might not have wanted to use for limited edition because it might feel a little bit too feminine and a little more exclusive. That's also a place where I can think about using florals and things like that. We talked about the poppies as being a part of my brainstorming, but figuring out a way to use ornament with the poppies would be something that would be super interesting for something like that. All right. So, I think I have three separate audience here to choose from. If I were working with a publisher on this, I would know a very specific audience, and I'd still be doing three different sketches to show three different concepts, but I think what I'm going to end up doing is coming up with my concepts based on my brainstorming, and then figuring out which of these audiences works best for those concepts. So, now that you guys have done a little bit of thinking about all the different audiences that are out there that could receive this book and be excited about it, who's the one that you're most excited for? When you first read this book, who was the one that you were like, "Oh my god, I can't wait to show this book to this audience?" That's the one that you're going to design for. So, next, before we get into actually jelling our concepts together, we're going to talk about some of the constraints that are going to help us along the way, and disable us from doing totally crazy things. I think constraints actually really help with creativity, especially if you're one of those people like me that suffers from blank page syndrome a little bit too much. I actually find that constraints actually spur creativity more than they disable them.
5. Determine Your Constraints: So, for this next section, we're going to be talking about some of the constraints that help us start our project and help us route through our concepts and figure out which ones are going to work and which ones aren't going to work. The first biggest constraint always with a book cover is the size of the book. Whether something is horizontal or vertical, usually it's going to be a vertical format. Those size that we're going to work with here is a six-inch by nine-inch size vertical. The next thing we're going to think about is actually how this book is going to be produced. So, with the Barnes & Noble classic series that I did, there was always three colors to contend with; the color of the leather itself plus two color foil. Working with a three-color palette is going to be really hard, but also very liberating because it'll limit the amount of craziness that can go on. I actually find that these limitations, especially when it comes to color, helps me keep my design from getting totally out of control. Color is one of those things that I definitely struggled with when I have access to every color under the sun. So, if you ever find yourself struggling with not knowing what to do or feeling like your design is getting overly complicated, strip your colors down, strip it down to two color, strip it down to one color, and you're going to find that all of a sudden you focus more on the design itself instead of the color, and that's really important. So, when you're thinking about color for your own project, think about it as a three-color project, and they're all going to be solid colors and not overprinting each other. One thing that I really like to think about is having one dark color, one medium color, and one light color. Then, you can mix and match depending on how your design works. The background might be very dark, and then the other two are the middle and light color or maybe the background is the middle color, and then your top foils that are printing or the light and the dark. But you're going to want a good value range. So, just play with some different color palettes. Open up whatever you can, whether it's a computer or whether it's just a pack of crayons, whatever is at your disposal to help combine a few different things together. You're going to think about one as being the dominant background color and then the other two as printing on top of that background color. Another big constraint that we're going to think about with book covers is actually making sure that our title and the author's name are very legible. This is something that we'll get more into when we talk about type styles, but it's something where if you have a concept that involves your lettering being crazy and very hard to read, that's only going to be working for a very specific audience. If you're making a limited edition book that's only released in museum gift shops, for instance, that might be something where you can go a little weird in terms of legibility. But if it's a major release that's going to be at a more basic bookstore, something that's going to reach a really, really wide audience, you want to make sure that whatever you're doing is very quick to read, that people can glance it instantaneously. Actually, one of the biggest things right now in terms of book cover design is making sure that it translates to the Kindle release cover, which part of that is actually making sure that you have a high enough contrast between the values of light and dark. Because if you're thinking about a Kindle, it's printing in black and white. So, even if you have a full-color design, you need to make sure that that design translates to black and white. One of the books that I worked on, where the constraints were specifically around the audience and where the book was going to end up, was the book cover that I did for The Circle for Dave Eggers. So, for that book, it was going to be a collaboration between McSweeney and Kanoff. Kanoff was handling the larger publication of it. They were going to be printing 100,000 copies. This was meant to be a major release book that was going to be in bookstores all over the country, in airport and train station bookstores, and it really had to grab people. At the same time, Dave wanted it to feel really special and to have a way for it to feel a little bit more high-end because it was the hardcover edition. So, we really worked the relationship between the jacket and the case in order to make that happen. So, for the main book, for the jacket, we had a very, very simple grabby design for it, something that you'd be able to read really quickly, see from across the room, and try to investigate it. But then, for the actual case, we had fun working with patterns. So, this is a two-color foil right here, a metallic silver foil, and then a red mat foil on top of this cloth bound cover. So, so far, when it comes to constraints, we've talked about the trend size being really important. I'll write that down. It's always good to keep notes of some of these super basic things just so that you don't accidentally make things in the wrong proportion as you're sketching. We talked about our production constraints, which in this case is going to be a three-color design. That's a two-color foil on top of a color background, which is our leatherbound option. We talked about legibility. But one of the big things about legibility is actually understanding the hierarchy of the typography that you need to have on the cover. So, one thing that is really important to do is just write out every bit of copy that needs to be on the cover so that you have that on hand. It's one of those things, it's very easy to forget something that's going to be on the cover or a subtitle, the little "a novel" or whatever, and just having all of that right in front of you to make sure that you actually get it on that page can be important. In the case of my book, which I'm doing as a novelization of The Wizard of Oz movie, I want to make sure that I include that as a subhead so that people that picked this up don't think that I'm visualizing the actual book itself, because there's going to be differences between the original Wizard of Oz book and the film. One of the clearest examples is the Ruby Slippers. It's something that came out through the film that was not actually in the book itself. I believe they were silver in the book itself. So, my copy is going to be The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, a novelization of the original 1939 motion picture. For each of your books, you're going to have really different constraints in terms of the title and the copy. One of the things to think about is, if you're making a book for a major author, you're probably going to need to give that author's name a little bit more real estate on the cover than if it was for an author that was not necessarily the main star of the show. In this case, the actual author might not need to be as prominent because this is not the actual author's direct texts. It's based on his work. It's based on the film based on his work. So, I might not need to put Stephen King across the top of my book in the same way that some of you guys might have to if you're choosing a book by a major author like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or something like that, where the author might need to be a bit more prominent. So, one of the things to think about when you're designing your cover is, it's actually always a good idea to have a little bit of actual type on your cover versus lettering. So, I've talked about this ad nauseum with lots of people. But just to give you a refresher, lettering is hand-drawn typography which is not a typeface. It's not a font. It's not something that you have a whole alphabet of and can type and send a file to, and other people can use it on their computer. It's a custom piece of art. It's what I love to do, but I know that it doesn't fill every role. One of the things that's really helpful, unless you're planning to do a lot of chapter titles within the book, is to actually find a typeface that works well with your lettering, that then you can advise the publisher to use for interior stuffs that the cover and the interior match each other a little bit better. Now, because of the amount of actual copy that I have on my cover, I think it's really smart for me to choose a typeface for the phrase, A Novelization Of The Original 1939 Film, which I could certainly, entirely draw myself, but it's just a really easy place to integrate a typeface that would match the rest of my work and allow me to have a typeface to suggest to the publisher to use on the interior of the design. So, I have all of my constraints written down, and I suggest that you guys do the same. Definitely, make sure that you have all your copy written down, it's going to be on the cover, because I can't tell you the number of times that I've accidentally left off a word or a letter or something like that. Then, it's really embarrassing when you send over that sketch that has something accidentally misspelled, has the author's name, two of the letters transposed, something like that. It's just really nice to have on hand. It's so simple. Next up, we're going to take all the brainstorming that we did, the audiences that we were thinking about and the constraints that we've laid out, and figure out how to gel those in just some final concepts we can get sketching.
6. Brainstorming: So, now you guys get to see how my brainstorming process works. So, one, I'm going to put my glasses on because I have very good vision but I do need it for the computer slash for writing and two, I'm going to just use really basic printer paper and a pen because one thing that I have found for myself is that the more precious I make this whole process, the less room I give myself to sort of move around and mess around and get strange. I think if this were all happening inside my notebook, I would be very self-conscious about what future generations will think in terms of how my brain works. So actually doing it on crappy paper and sketching on crappy paper. I've always been a big proponent of not keeping a sketchbook, if you find you're a perfectionist, can be really important. So I'm just going to start by just writing down things that I think about, when I think about my experience with the Wizard of Oz. Some of them are going to be based on the setting, some of them are going to be based on costumes, some will be based on just random things that pop into my mind but there's a lot of visual stuff to pull from with The Wizard of Oz. Some things will just be really literal like writing down characters names like Wizard and Oz. When I think about Oz, I think about how I can make this book into almost another one of these Drop Caps books where I use O and Z as like a big thing but I'm trying not to get myself in a visual place yet so I'm just going to write it down. You have these sort of four main characters in the book Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man and Scarecrow and the things that they're seeking which for Dorothy is to go home, the lion wants courage, the Tin Man wants a heart and Scarecrow wants a brain. That's definitely stuff that can be translated into something visually. So I feel like I got a pretty good start here so let me go over some of the things that I ended up writing down. Because again, this is such a visual book and film, a lot of these things are going to be actually just characters or costumes or things that were actually physically present in the film. In terms of the more broader big picture stuff, there's going to be a little bit of that too but I just had a lot to pull from in terms of actual things to visualize so that's a big part of my list. So, I've got the Wizard, Oz, the main characters, Dorothy who wanted home, the lion who wanted courage, the Tin Man who wanted a heart, and Scarecrow who wanted a brain, gingham, the sort of pattern on Dorothy's dress really stood out to me as something, her two braids. I feel like in general the whole styling of her is like a very innocent young girl. The sepia versus color transition and what that means, a rainbow, the munchkins, the lollipop guild, a horse of a different color, Emerald City, yellow brick road, ruby slippers, the phrase "I'm melting", "surrender, Dorothy" when the witch writes it in the sky with the smoke from her broom, the field of poppies, the winged monkeys, Gilda the good witch, good versus evil, the witch under the house and the striped socks of her feet. So all these things are going to be really useful for us as we move forward but the first thing that we have to really do is consider some of the constraints that we have and also the audience that we're going after. So, I will table this for a little while because this is all going to be amazing in terms of referencing for doing small illustrations, doing ornaments, things like that, or even pulling into the concept of the type itself. But I won't be able to work with it really until I actually know what I need to get out of this cover and sort of what my constraints are, and who I really want to be the person picking up this book. So, at this point if you haven't already done your own research, go ahead and do that and then we'll set it aside and bring it back into our work a little bit later.
7. Select Your Concepts: So, what we're going to be doing in our next lesson is to take our earlier concept work as well as our audience and our constraints and tried to gel those into a set of concepts that we can start sketching with. So, now I've got my sheets of paper that I've already taken my notes on. I'm going to try to look through this and figure out how I can take all of these things, my constraints, my audience, and my notes that I took while I was brainstorming and figure out how to gel those unaccustomed concepts. So, the reason why these all work together is that there's going to be stuff that comes up in your constraints that eliminate some of the things as options in your brainstorming list. So, for instance, we know that we're doing this as two-color foil on a color background. So, at one point in my list, I had listed rainbow as an option. Rainbow is not going to be an option if we don't have the full access to the full rainbow especially if you're thinking about a kids book or something like that. Kids get very weird if the rainbow is not translated exactly as the rainbow as do publishers. So, I can just straight up cross that off as something that we're not going to be able to do. The things that student stood out to me are using OZ. When I think about that, I can go one of two ways that can go either the making like a really keep sake ornate addition, or that could go really well for the kids addition because you think about these two giant letters and kids gravitating towards the alphabet. I could do something with that where, based on the illustration we feel more appropriate for kids or not. So, I'm going to circle that as being a potential option to move forward with. The other thing would be using these four different characters. One of the things that I think about when I come up with a set of ideas that work together is, how would this work in terms of ornamentation, could I come up with a border that is symmetrical that would work together. So, it's very convenient that we have forming characters because there's four corners on a book cover. So, we can think about making a little ornament in the four different corners of that book cover one for each of the characters. So, I think that could really work out, especially for something that could be like more ornate and ornament-driven. Something where it's more about symbols of the characters and the characters themselves. Gineham thing could work, but it's also really specific and I think it doesn't translate as well to foil. That's one of those things that I might do as like end papers because the pattern, but it might not work as well on the cover. Same thing with the braids and things like that. Toto's not really a main character and I think it'd be nice to see him involved in the cover, but I don't think that Toto alone could work. Same thing for the basket that Toto was in on the bicycle, that the initial neighbor that wants to end Toto was riding around on. Another thing that stood out to me as the CPO versus color. But unfortunately, I think because of our constraints, we also can't go that road. The munchkins again, too specific and also like a little weird in terms of 2018 and lollipop guild and things like that very specific. Horse of a different color could work but, I again I think it would very much depend on the colors that we were choosing. Emerald city is a great visualization. I also feel like the style that emerald city was rendered in the film is really easy to translate slash fun to translate, thing for a book cover because it feels very like 1920's. It has these rounded shapes that go up, which could work really well when translated into more ornamental. So, I'm going to circle that as being something that I can go back to, same with yellow brick road. I mean that's going to really limit us in terms of the colors that we choose. If I do something with the yellow brick road, it means that at least one of the colors has to be yellow. Same thing with the poppies, I can't just make the poppies into purple poppies. So, things like yellow brick road would mean that either the leather itself would be yellow or one of the foils would be yellow. With the poppies either the book itself would be red or one of the foils would be red. Doing something with a tornado makes sense. I'll circle that just in case it comes up and same with the ruby slippers. I can't imagine doing something where the ruby slippers are the primary element. But the idea of bringing those in as a secondary element because they are so recognizable. I also think it could be a really good thing in terms of color. If you think about the ruby slippers as being this like accent color where you only get one small hint of it. I think that could really be beautiful and make them stand out. When I think about using color a lot of times, I'm thinking about not letting more than one color shine on the cover. There might be two more subdued tones than one really bright tone or one metallic tone, and then two tones that are not. That way you have this moment where you have your attention grabbing them and what you really want people to focus in on that. Then some of the other things that I was thinking about, like this green is something that I think is going to definitely play into one of my options. Do you think about the green face of the which. You think about Emerald city as being green. I just feel like that as a color could really work if especially if I end up using Emerald city somewhere on the cover. So, now that I've gone through my list and I had a bunch of things highlighted. Next, what I'll end up doing is making some really basic thumbnails that are a little bit about layout, but more about how much illustration is going to play into the cover versus just typography.
8. Sketch Initial Thumbnails: So once we're past the verbal brainstorming stage of things I get into sketching. There's a few different ways that I can start. Sometimes I start with thumbnails that are just me exploring different concepts and different layouts. Sometimes I will start just very specifically with just layouts if I already know I'm not exploring a wide variety of concepts, but I have been sketching a little bit more on an iPad Pro recently. I used to be all analog when it came to sketches. But now I'm for better or for worse mostly all iPad Pro. It's just become a really easy way for me to travel and sketch and not have to bring loads of art supplies with me and also I'm a little addicted to commandzying my way through the creative process. So, I have my ideas that I sort of came up with here but first what I'm going to talk to you guys about is one of the things that I consider when I'm thinking about each of these concepts and sort of how that's going to translate into a book cover. So, one of the first things is whether or not my layout is going to be symmetrical or asymmetrical. I think that's something that you can really think about with book cover design because either as a valid approach I think it's a little easier to make designs that are symmetrical that feel well-balanced. Certainly making a well-balanced asymmetrical cover is going to be a bit more challenging and feel more like a level two work. But I really like playing with both symmetry and asymmetry in my work. Another thing that we'll talk about is the balance of typography versus illustration. So I think one of the things that makes for a successful book cover is one in which there is a focal element on the cover rather than disparate elements that are at the same level of emphasis. Even just make more dynamic compositions by making one's in which everything is not the same level of importance. So what I don't want to do is create a cover in which every word is the same and the illustrations are basically the same size of the words. I think it's a lot harder to make something that feels right and feels dynamic versus letting one thing be the shining star and the other things to be a little bit secondary. So just to talk to you guys about how I think in terms of that, I'm just going to draw a basic rectangle to represent our book cover here. I'm not going to actually draw any of the illustrations right now. I'm just going to block out how I could think about links some of those things out. So in terms of symmetrical clearly you would have your vertical symmetry axis or your horizontal symmetry axis. Then everything would fall exactly centered in that. That would include doing illustration. You could have a centered illustration right here. You could have symmetrical illustrations in the corner. You could have symmetrical illustrations other places. But a symmetrical design would be one in which you see whatever happens in terms of the amount of detail. It could be different actual illustrations but the sort of level of detail and space taken up by those elements are even across the board. Then with an asymmetrical layout, you're not going to have to abide by those rules where you have everything kind of even and centered across the way. So you have a little bit more room to play but you have to sort of figure out what you're going to emphasize. So with something that's asymmetrical, I would recommend using just a single illustration with some smaller illustrations as a part of it or basically just giving one point whether it's in the bottom left or bottom right. A place where the eye can sort of rest in terms of illustration. So, what you don't often find is something where there's a big illustration up in the one corner without there being something equally weighted down at the bottom. So an example might be like I'll have a big spot illustration here and then my type can come in along this line like that. Or I could have, man there's just like a million ways to handle asymmetry. You can have it be half symmetrical. Where you have a centered illustration here but then the type itself feels a little off balance. So now I'm going to start taking my sort of like muck of ideas that I've come up with here in figuring out how to actually translate those into something. So one thing that I do is do these really rough concept thumbnails. So these do not even influence the final layouts that I end up doing. They're more just so that I can figure out if something's going to be illustrative, what's the relationship of the illustration to the type going to be? What's sort of like the bare-bones most basic ideas that I have in terms of layout? Then how are those going to translate into which audience they match up for and things like that? So if I'm thinking about my OZ, my OZ, what are the different ways that I can handle that? That would mean to me that o and z is given a huge prominence on the cover. So what I can do is just make some very basic thumbnails. I'll do a few different versions here in which I think about my O and Z. So certainly the wizard of OZ like that with my author name and my subhead maybe somewhere in there. I'm not sure. Could be something. Then I've got this room around the type to play with illustration. I can make the OZ itself really illustrative or something like that or just really decorative. So that can be one general way that I could handle that. So in this case, I probably can't do OZ big because I want you to read the wizard of first. If I put the wizard of inside the area it might be a little hard to read. You might read OZ the wizard of which nobody wants. So let's try by just doing the wizard of and then we have our stacked O. Maybe we'll even do some sort of monogram. Who knows if that will even work? So yeah, the idea of a monogram is interesting too. Like maybe there's a way that I can do this horizontal format but then make the O and Z work together. In this case I have my O and Z being a very rounded squarish letter forms. Maybe I want to do something more condensed so I can get it bigger on the page. I can even put my of inside that O there. That's something. Whereas these secondary words are you can kind of play with their positioning because it's actually not as important that you read them straight away versus the main words in the title like wizard and OZ. We definitely need to make sure those read in order. But words like the and of as long as they're there and as long as it's not crazy out of order we should be okay. Next I'm going to talk about using these four elements. I had talked about thinking about putting those in a border. So that's an easy thing to sketch out and have in the back of my mind as I sketch. So I can make these four little corner ornament areas where I know that I'll come up with an icon that represents home, courage heart, brain and put those in there surrounded by some sort of ornamentation. Maybe I'll do two thumbnails. One that includes an illustration within that and one that does not. So for the one that does not maybe I do The Wizard of Oz dot, dot, author. Then for my one with the illustration I think what illustration do I want in there? Well, I do have my Emerald City which I could use somewhere. So why don't I think about incorporating Emerald City either symmetrically or not since we already have this symmetrical border and maybe we will do it symmetrically. I can even tuck my Oz behind my Emerald City there. A lot of times as you're sketching ideas will just sort of come to you or you'll get something in your head as you're brainstorming and you're like, "I just have to get that on paper." I wouldn't have initially thought, "Oh, I should have Emerald City in front of the words OZ." But as I was sketching it I ran out of room to draw OZ therefore now OZ is behind Emerald City and I'm like, "That could look really good." So you have to leave room for those sort of things to happen. That's why I think that having a real process to work through and having moments where you have to make little mistakes or figure things out, allows things to creep in that weren't part of your initial ideation process. I think that could be really fun and exciting. All right so I think either of those options could work but I'm more excited about this one. So I'm going to highlight that guy. I think of all of my things up here just in terms of a very basic layout I might be most excited about this one. Especially if I think about doing this one for the kids option because I think I can do my o and z and my wizard and the in a san-serif. Something that's a little bit easier for little kids to read. That's not this insane decorative type that they might not understand. I think that could really work out. Now what else do I have here?Something popped in my head when I wrote down the yellow brick road and the ruby slippers and I know that this is like a little bit of a rip off of another person who I'm friends with, a whole thing. But I was thinking how cool it would be to write out the lettering in the yellow brick road maybe Allah Mosaic Allah Nick Missoni. You'll have to go check out all of his stuff because he's amazing. But I could definitely imagine doing something which would work as a full Illustrated cover that has our yellow brick road with Dorothy's ruby slippers here. A secondary type down at the bottom and then the Wizard of Oz actually done in the bricks or in a mosaic or something like that and that could be really fun. If I was going to do something that was sort of like a good versus evil. One of the things that I had thought about is this sort of like using different type styles to represent good versus evil. So we can think about doing that in a really symmetrical way by just putting a line down the center of our page and having half of it be good and half of it be evil. I could also split the page this way which might be a little easier or more dynamic. Why don't I start with that and see where it takes me. I can have it so that this side is a little bit more rough and we're really not getting much of it on there. Then the other side is the script. So that could be an option. I definitely have to figure out how to make that work in terms of getting enough of either side on there but I think that that could be an interesting way to handle it entirely typographically. All right, and then last but not least one of the ideas that I had talked about was doing something with this surrender Dorothy sky writing. So why don't I just draw one more that would utilize a script for that. This would be one of those ones where the illustration it's - it would be a very illustrative cover because the type itself is illustration. But in terms of narrative illustration we're going to put that witch just as tiny as possible. I think it wouldn't look as great if the witch was taking up this much of our layout so instead we'll put her way down here just as a super loose mock-up and then The Wizard of Oz. I'll figure out how to get that work as a script once we're going. But I think this gives me some really basic kind of conceptual ideas before I get working on my layout to guide me through figuring out what we're going to do next. I think the main thing that I need to think about is which of these is going to be right for the right audience. So I think that this Wizard of Oz with the witch making this script. I think that feels really right for if I'm trying to target more of like a female power audience or something like that. Or even like something that I could say that it would be good for kids but it's hard with scripts for kids. So I do feel like that's a youthful audience. Maybe it's something that could be sort of like in the YA zone. Then my ones with the ornamentation in the corner I think those would translate really well to doing a special leather bound edition version. Then this top version with my giant OZ, that could be something that depending on how I handle the o and z it could be really decorative and crazy and work really well as a leather bound edition or it could be something that is done a bit more simple and I figured out ways to integrate some illustration into that composition so that I can make it more for my kid friendly audience. So what I want you guys to do now is to take this list that you guys made while you were brainstorming and figure out how to gel them together into some basic concepts just like how I did. So do not worry what they look like. You can tell by these that there it's just my loose handwriting. I'm not choosing style based on this. I'm not even choosing capitalization stuff yet. But it's just important to think about how some of these things that you had thought about can translate to a book cover itself. So I wouldn't worry about being settled on one concept at this point. I think taking a few of your concepts through the layout stage and even through a little bit of style exploration stage is going to really help you out in making a decision on your final. Next we're going to talk more about actually getting in and laying out our type and figuring out a good hierarchy. I've got a pretty loose idea of what I want things to look like but we're going to talk about why things are sized the way they are. How much room they should take up in the composition and how you can just start being the about how layout is going to inform the decisions that you make in terms of the topography that you draw and choose.
9. Create Your Layouts: So, well I just did these rough thumbnails. What you can probably tell is that I did not sketch out all of the type and where it goes. That's just because I knew that we were going to enter the next stage which is more fleshed out layout and talking through the layout. So, one of the things that I wanted to keep by me where my initial thumbnail sketches that I made, and then also that sheet of paper that has the title and author name and all the copy that needs to go on this cover, just that I make sure they keep everything into account and can make sure that everything actually makes it onto the cover. So, before I get into making my new layouts for Wizard of Oz, I want to show you just what these sort of layout grids look like based on a piece that I already did. So, this Huckleberry Finn cover here, has a pretty complex layout because there's a lot of copy that went on this cover. So, I'm just going to draw out my basic grid here on the sheet of tracing paper so that you guys can see what my underlying sketch grid would have looked like. So, as you can see, this is basically what a lot of my grids for starting my layout end up looking like. It's just sort of mocking out, mocking up. Okay. Where are the word's going to go? Not what are the words going to look like. What words are gonna have the emphasis that they need to have? What words are going to be de-emphasized? Where's my illustration going to go? So, when I talk about beginning layout, it's a lot of this. It's not thinking about type styles at all. It's about letting the size and scale of the words inform what kind of type styles we're going to choose later and just about making a really pleasing composition on a page. So, I'm going to show you guys some of the Barnes and Noble covers that I did and show you how the copy itself it's going to be on the cover impacted the layout and design that I was doing. So, the couple of things that keep all of these books consistent are the author's name is always in the same size, in the same typeface, generally in the same place on the cover. The spines are all very similar in that they always have the same, illustration happens in the same place, and the titles and the author's name happen in the same place. What this means is that when you stack them all up next to each other, everything is going to line up so that you can read them across the board the same. So this is something that once that rule is setup, I cannot deviate. But rules are really good in that way. It makes it a lot easier to make a series if you set a few rules that you can then follow throughout the series. Then what's going to have a really dramatic impact on your layout is just what you have in front of you in terms of the copy. So, for Frankenstein for instance, I had talked about how picking a book that only has a single word as a title that can lead to difficulties. Frankenstein was a huge one just because there are so many letters in the word Frankenstein, and one of the things that you'll find to be true about book covers is that you cannot hyphenate words on a book cover. It is not possible. You'd have to be working on a very specific adult driven fiction, fancy pants book in order to get an art director to be okay with you hyphenating word. So, Frankenstein couldn't be broken up into Franken-stein or whoever else it would fill the composition more. We had to figure out how to keep it all on one line while keeping it legible, taking up as much room as possible so that type wasn't really tiny on the cover. So, that's something that we're going to think about moving forward, is how big does this need to be so that we're making sure we're emphasizing the right words. So, in this case, it gave me a lot of room for illustration. So, actually, the title itself impacted how much illustration was going to be on the cover. So, that's something that you can really think about is all of these elements have to work together. Some are going to lead to a much easier translation to an illustrative cover, and some are going to lead to a much easier translation to a typographic only cover. So, for each of these, I'm going to use my art board which is set to six by nine, and actually just start copying in where I think this type can go. I'll start with my Wizard of OZ and we can talk about different ways that we can make that type work together. So, first of all, what I'll probably do is, I know that I probably want some sort of border on this, so I'm just going to draw in a really basic border. All of my books for Barnes and Noble have a border that starts at about the same distance from the edge. So, next, I'm going to add my OZ. Well, actually I'll just add in where I think everything's going to be. So, in my initial sketch, I have The Wizard on straight baselines and then OZ on a straight baseline as well. But I want to make it a little bit more dynamic. So, I have a few options here. What I don't want to do is have everything be willy-nilly and all on different baselines unless I'm going for some very ornate Victorian looking thing. But because I know that I want "OZ" to be on a straight baseline, I want to keep at least one other thing on a straight baseline. So, why don't I go ahead and have "the" be on a straight baseline and "OZ" beyond the straight baseline, and then "wizard" on an undulating baseline. I think that might be a nice alternating pattern to have. So, let's add "the" up here, and I'm just going to draw two lines, one for the potential cap height, and one for the baseline, and then "wizard" is going to go here. I'm going to do this on a wavy baseline. Next I have my "of" which in my initial sketch I had tucked within "OZ" and I actually think that's going to work in my favor. So, then I don't have to figure out adding another line before wizard, which it might actually be a little bit difficult to tuck that in without going in a more asymmetrical direction. So, let's just sketch "OZ" down here. Alright. Then my "of" is going to go within my, in my "O". I'm going to just comb that up here just so I know where that's going to hit even though this, normally I wouldn't be putting in type it all into this early part. Here we go. I can put my "of" somewhere around there. Then next we have "by Frank L Baum" and then "a novelization of the original 1939 motion picture". In this case, I'm going to do my "a novelization" line first, and then "Frank L Baum" at the bottom. Then, maybe I'll do my "by" line or my "by" on a little angle here. There we go. Then "a novelization". This is going to be typeset, so I can just lay it in there as lines and we'll figure out what happens to it. Actually totally false. I'm looking at this wavy thing here. Let's do some wavy lines for that. Nice repetition there. So, we have straight, wavy, straight, wavy, straight. I know it looks good. So, this is a really good place to begin when it comes to figuring out our type styles and how big things are going to be. But I'm going to move on and do my layouts for some of these other guys too. So, next let's do our version that has these ornaments on the corner, the icons that represent these different characters. So, again, I'm going to draw my border. All right, and I'm going to add my shapes in the corner that are going to contain my illustrations. Now these are sort of arbitrary what they could be. I'm just going to draw them in as basics half circle or quarter circles, but I could do something more interesting with them depending on what happens with the illustration later. But this is a good way to start. We can add a bunch of additional elements near them later if we feel like it. Maybe I'll just pop those in as if I'm gonna do something later just to eat up some of the space. Then, we'll figure out how to put our type in. So, I have two sketches here that use these corner elements. One that has the "OZ" being, this is pretty symmetrical. I'm okay exploring a more symmetrical layout here. Why don't I actually do a really rough sketch for both a symmetrical and asymmetrical option. So, in this case, in terms of figuring out your baseline, there's a bunch of different ways that you can handle the baseline of any word in a composition. I'll run through them super quick right now and just erase them as I go. So, there is straight, which would be straight across. There is, as we saw earlier, this undulating flag baseline. There's an upward angle baseline. There is a downward angle baseline. There's also an arched baseline like this. All of those things can work together or separately. You can use the same one multiple times within a layout. But these are all just different ways that you can put type on a page. What I find is that they all serve very different purposes. So, with Frankenstein for instance, the reason why I ended up using that angled baseline like that is because it gave me more room to put more letters. So, me putting Frankenstein across a page like that gives me a lot more real estate to actually add letters versus doing it across. If you actually just measure that, it's longer, if I do it at this upward angle versus if I do it straight across. So, one of the reasons to think about using an upward angle baseline it's actually, if you have a longer word and you don't want it to totally shrink in your layout and you need to have it dominate a little bit more. So, in my initial sketch, I have some of these guys on an arc-based line, and I think that "wizard" and then having "of" underneath wizard would be really nice. So, I'm gonna start by actually just putting my arc to line for a wizard. Then I could choose to either have "the" and "of" also arched. I could also have one of them reverse arcs so there's this play between them. But I think I might put a straight "the" and straight "of" just because we do have this really straight border going on and I think having something that feels like it anchors to that makes sense to me. Alright. Then we've got our "OZ", actually I'm gonna make that a little bit smaller because I'm taking up a lot of vertical space right now. We talked about having our Emerald City here. What if we have a yellow brick road come down. Then we can put some type along the side here. How about "a novelization" goes here and then "based on the novel by Frank L. Baum" goes here and we can figure that out a little bit later since we're going to use type for that part. So, next, why don't I mark-up my, because it'll be a pretty straightforward one, my witch" making it out of smoke. So, I'll go ahead and make my border again, and I'll probably figure something out with this border on this one just to make it feel interesting because right now it's just a straight line. Then why don't we get my witch over here. Again, very loose. I will actually do that illustration later. We're going to start actually with our author for this one, because that one's going to be a bit more straightforward. Then, let's do, because everything is very straight down here, let's keep this on this very dynamic angle which I feel like will make sense with the witch cruising downward too. So, let's do the wizard of and then OZ is going to be a challenge here. Maybe our of is in the wrong place. Let's do of over here, of OZ like that. I think that makes sense to me. Well, these are my basic layouts, and now that we have our layouts, we can move on and start talking about actually getting some copy in there and figuring out what styles we're going to work in and what constraints that we have in terms of the style based on our layout. So, now what I want you guys to do is take those really initial rough concept sketches that you did alongside your final copy, everything that's going to go on the title and let's work together to figure out some layouts that are going to work where you are going to draw out your basic grid based on what size the type should be on the cover based on what needs emphasis. We'll figure out style after this, don't worry about style, just figure out the hierarchy of what you want to read based on scale alone.
10. Sketch Your Letterforms: So, the next step that we're going to get into is making some really basic decisions on style. So, I have talked a bunch about making choices when it comes to building our typography and starting first with the skeleton of the type. So, the skeleton is the most basic structure that you could think about in terms of what actually makes the type into the shape that it is. So, one of the things that we can think about is these big categories of style, like is it a Roman? Which would be serif or sans-serif, or is it a script? Which would be a very different style structure, and we can make a very, very basic decision first about which things are going to be Roman, which things are going to be script, is there going to be script at all? The other thing that we can do is start talking about case. So, we can talk, is it going to be all caps? Is going to be title case, which is when the initial letter of the word is capitalized and the rest of them are lowercase? Is it going to be lowercase for some reason? Or is it going to be small caps, where it's actually all caps except the initial letter is taller than the rest of the letter forms? So, what we can do is look at our layouts and figure out what makes sense based on the layout that we have. So, if you already know that a word is being downplayed in scale, what you don't want to do is downplay it more by having it be in title case or lowercase. You can make it larger by making it uppercase. So, for this layout, for instance, I know that wizard is probably going to need to be an uppercase just so I can make sure it takes enough place on the page. And in general, I think because this is the one that we were talking about as being kid friendly, I'm probably going to avoid script for this one. So, why don't I just go ahead and write in wizard, not making any style choices, just getting letters in the place where I think that they may end up being. So, I get wizard on there and then we'll get the on there. For the, I can choose to make it all uppercase, which would be very kid friendly, kids are used to learning their first letters as being in all uppercase, or I can do upper and lower making the first letter T larger and H-E being smaller. I'll look at the rest of the page and see if there's another call to action for that, like if there's another place that I can use upper and lower or title case. And in this case, because of my a novelization type, I probably have an opportunity to do that. So, what I might do is do the and of in title case in order to have another place on the page other than this bottom third of the composition that uses capitalization in that way. So, why don't I go ahead and make the. I'm kind of ignore my cap height thing here. Actually no. Let me go ahead and lower these guys. Here we go. That makes it make more sense, and then we'll make of into stylized lowercase. Then, a novelization. I'm just going to write in really loosely and I can do motion picture or film here, and then by. Let's do in a similar style toour of, L. Frank. Too narrow. So, I drew my letter forms a little too narrow here and thanks to the magic of iPads, I can select and stretch that out. All right. So, this is in by no stretch perfect. You can see that I get really dense down at the bottom and really loose up at top. So, one of the things that I do really appreciate about working on the iPad is that I can move things around and mess with them in my sketch, and it's a lot harder to do if you're working entirely by hand on a piece of paper. So, before I actually go into start doing the tightened up sketch and figuring out style for this, I'll actually just reposition and move things around to make sure my letter spacing is good and what not. But let's move on for now because I need to do all sorts of stuff, like merge layers and la la la, and let's figure out our styles for the rest of these covers. So next, in the order of my iPad, we have our one with the four illustrations in the corner. So again,we have this arch baseline for wizard. I don't think that if I make wizard upper and lowercase here it's going to make all too much sense. You're going to really understand that arch better if it's all uppercase. So, I'm just going to go ahead and mark that in, and so there's a couple of ways that I could handle this. I could actually have all of the type angled on that baseline, but I didn't do that for this, instead I have it all vertical. The stems of my letter forms are vertical and it's just wraps around the baseline. I'll show you the different ways that that works. So, let me redraw that in the other way, which would be, it would look more like you were typesetting it on an angle instead of drawing it differently. So, my eye would be angled like that. All of my letters would walk along the baseline instead of actually being drawn vertically along that baseline. I actually like that version a little bit better. So, why don't we stick with that? And then, now in terms of our the and of, let's again do something that is upper and lower. But in this case, because this is not our book that's geared towards children, I can actually mix in some scripts or some italic if I feel like it. I love using scripts for secondary words, things that aren't the most prominent word on the page, and it's a nice way to add something like visual texture without affecting legibility too much. So, in this case, I'll just go ahead and put in a very basic script the and script of, and then let's make our Oz into a Roman, very wide letter forms here, and now I have to get a little bit more specific for my a novelization type down here. And I might actually do this one in all uppercase when I typeset it, just because I don't have an angled baseline, I don't want to do it in the script and I think that that it might anchor it because I have a lot of other stuff going on. What I can do though is mixing a little bit of script D italic within it for my secondary words like of and the and a. Next, we have our script. So, figuring out our continuous lines script for this Surrender Dorothy option. Actually in the films, Surrender Dorothy isn't rendered in a script, it's written in a loopy, san-serif style, which we could totally replicate if we felt like it. But this just felt like a really good opportunity to do a continuous line script, so I think I'm going to roll with that. So, in this case, I can already tell that this the is actually going to be too close to our edge here. So, I'm going to scoot this whole guy down, and I can tell that because I can visualize what those words are going to look like in my head. So, I think one of the things to think about when you think about continuous line is that it doesn't actually have to be perfectly continuous. So, we're going to try and get it as continuous as we can without actually making it continuous. In this case, I have a much narrower area for my author based on my layout. So, I'm going to have to draw some narrower type, and this is a good example of when the layout actually dictates a lot about your typography. So, I'm going to end up drawing a very condensed style there just because I have less room to play with, and I want to make sure that that author's name gets to be big enough on the title or on the cover. So, what I want you guys to do now is take the thumbnail sketches that you had and the layouts that you made from the last round and start making some really basic decisions about how actually this type is going to take shape in your layout. Decide which words need to be capitalized, which don't need to be capitalized. Decide whether or not you're going to work with Roman letter forms or script letter forms, and then we can work from there to build up the type and really get that style, at to evolve just as we work.
11. Finalize Your Letterforms: So, we have a bunch of different directions, layout, and structurally based on our last round, but for the sake of time and also just to show you guys as much style variety as possible, we're going to move forward with just a single sketch. I think that this is one version I really like conceptually, and I also like that it can combine a bunch of different styles. So, I've already done a little bit to start mapping out where my type is going to go, and I made some really basic decisions. Now, I can choose whether or not I'm going to remain with those decisions or undo them. I think because we had talked about this version as being more like high-end leather-bound collector's edition, I'm going to actually keep my slope as being angled because I think that feels a little bit more traditional, and I think it's going to make it feel a little bit more classic and high-end versus a vertical slope. When I initially did this sketch, I had my the and my of mapped out as script. I think I'm going to still keep it that way because I want to mix some script into this layout. But I think that if I have Wizard or OZ, the script, it's going to really impact how much drama is happening in this title. I want to make sure my Wizard and my OZ can be bold enough, that you can really read this and that the illustration that surrounds it is not going to swallow up the lettering. So, I'm going to keep those as Roman, Latin letter-forms, and then we can figure out how to elaborate those from here. So, I currently have my the and of as an unconnected script. I can choose whether or not I want my the to get a little more elaborate and swashy or whether I want it to actually be pretty simple. So, let's go ahead and add some swashes to my the. I'm going to zoom in so that you guys can see a little bit better, but not so much that I can't see my overall layout. So, if I were going to add a swash here, there's a couple places where it can happen. One is clearly having this left side of the T. So, I already kind of have that going, but I can make that a little bit more elaborate. I'm probably not going to do it down here too much at the bottom because I think it'll start reading as a J. Then, I can have my T have this little loop up top here or have my T crossbar go all the way across. So, that's going to depend on what I do with my H. If I have my T cross over like this, I might not do something as elaborate with my H up here, or maybe I will and go totally bananas. So, let's swash out our H, and then we can add a swash here on our E. I think that's going to look pretty fancy. At this points, I might actually do this on a separate layer and minimize the opacity of my initial thoughts, redrawing the type as I see fit. So, why don't I go ahead and do that? Again, I'm not a person that uses these as my final art. So, I just try to get them as tight as I can just so that they get the point across and so that I can use them as a guide as I move forward, but not that they are the most insanely perfect drafted scripts you've ever seen in your whole life. There we go. I dropped my H below the baseline here. I can choose to have that have a swash on it, but I think it's going to get too complicated with my letterforms that are underneath it. So, I will just leave it like that. All right. We've got our the. Now let's do our of. For this O connecting to the F, what I can do is have the crossbar of the F be made up from the swash of that O. Then, if I wanted to add a swash to this, I would probably do it right here. I can do it under here too, but we might get some legibility issues. Let's see how it looks. I think that just looks like a giant Z. So, let's fake it and add a swash here that mimics what's going on rather than connecting it. Now, I'm actually going to draw in my tiny type because I knew I wanted to have a swash O as a part of that. So, let's just mark this up. I'll probably be using a font for this in my final. So, I don't have to be insane in how I draft this. I just want to get it somewhat in the right place. We can add a nice, big swashy tail on that F. Now, next, we have our Wizard and our OZ. So, we know that we want those to be Roman letter-forms. So, let's go ahead and draft those a little bit better. What I want to make sure is that where this letter starts here is basically the same place as where this letter ends here. This is something that we can definitely adjust when I'm working on the final, but it's just something to keep in mind as I'm doing it now. Then, for OZ, we've got our O and our Z. All right. Let's draw our tiny type here. Now, this is when I would go in and start trying to make some of those stylistic structural decisions that we had talked about. How high is my crossbar of my A going to be? How is my M going to be drafted versus my W? Things like that. We're going to make those changes to the skeleton now so that when we start adding weight and things like that, that all plays into it. So, I think I want my word Wizard and OZ to be in a San-serif style. The reason for that is, I think because we have this really pretty, fuzzy script here, having it feel a little bit more modern with these makes sense to me. Or maybe what we can do is add those glyphic serifs to this guy, so that it doesn't get too fuzzy for Wizard and reads really clearly, and then we can get more elaborate with our serifs down here on our OZ even though there's only a place to add a serif on our Z and not on our O. So, let's go ahead and make some style choices on our Wizard here. Maybe lowering our crossbar, and which then might make me want to lower my bowl of my R, like so. This leg of the R would be one of those places where you could have a swash coming off of it, and that might actually be a way to handle the swash here. But I really like how these have a symmetry to them. So, I'm not going to do it in this circumstance. I'll show you what that would look like if I did. I basically bring this guy down and figure out a way to loop that down into there. So, I'm going to not do that in this circumstance, but that would be one of those places that I would love to add a swash normally. I'm going to start adding a little bit of weight to this guy. I think I want my Wizard to be not high contrast. We're going to talk about adding decoration to our letterforms after this. If my letterforms are too high contrast, it's going to limit what kind of decoration I can do. Because the decoration will end up feeling heavier than the letterforms themselves which is never a good idea and can really impact your legibility. So, let's just go ahead and get these in there. All right, we've got our wizard, and now we need our OZ. So, there's a couple of ways that I can handle the weight of OZ. If I want wizard and OZ to feel like they're the same, I would apply weight very similarly. But if I want them to feel a little bit different, I can choose to take a huge drastic difference in how I apply weight to my OZ. I think I definitely wanted to, because I have this alternating style thing with my script, I definitely want it to be a low contrast situation, but what I might do is actually beef up the weight a little bit just so that I don't have too much whitespace on the inside of my O and Z. Now, that I'm looking at this, I feel like my O and Z are super far apart from each other. So, what I'm going to do is I'll either stretch them and then retool them so they don't feel stretched or I can just scoot them in and not really care about having my layout be perfectly aligned to these edges. In this case, I feel like as long as my small type is aligning to it, it makes sense. Then I can figure something out with decoration to make this all feel like it works together. So, let's just select them and scoot them in like so. There we go. All right. I haven't added any weight to my scripts yet. I think they're just going to disappear if they are really thin monoline script. So, there's two things I could do. I could choose to beef them up and keep them all in here, which would make them feel like really modern or I can have them be more high contrast and add some weights where the downstrokes would be. I think I'm going to lean towards that. Having some stroke variation in my script means that I can have some stroke variation throughout the rest of my layout and in my illustration. One of the other two things big things to consider when it comes to scripts is you don't want, if you can help it, to have your squashes be heavier than the body of your type or your lettering. Because if it is it's going to actually make it a little bit harder to read. The more weight you have in your swashes, the more they're going to start reading like letterforms themselves. So, what I tend to do is add all my weight my letterforms first and then choose where I'm going to add weight to my swashes. Then when I do, I don't add it in a way that is heavier than the body of my type itself. Another thing to consider is that you want to make sure that whenever you are having two body parts of your type overlapping, that you're never having two fix overlap each other, which means you're going to have to shift things around a little bit to make that happen. In the case of this T crossing over the H, what I can do is I can either choose to thin out my H as it goes up and then I can make this part of my T thicker or I can just shift my weight of my T over sO that it happens more on this side of the letter and starts to taper off as it intersects with that H. So, I think that's what I'm going to do for this guy here. Terminals can be applied to scripts as well. I think I'm going to add some little teardrop terminals on this guy, to figure out a way to elegantly handle the ends of these letters and I just need to make sure I do it in more than one place. You don't have to do it every single time, but you definitely need more than one occurrence when you're doing stuff. Now, let's go ahead and similarly add weight to our of. I'm going to add a bit of weight up here even though it is an upstroke, just to get a little bit of body into that and then our f. Because what I'm going for is a mirrored look here, I'm going to make sure that I add my weight and my terminals in the same way between these two sides. Let's go ahead and flesh out this L Frank Baum down here as well. Now, what I can do, if I feel like it, is I can keep some high contrast here compared to doing a low contrast for the Wizard and OZ. I think that might actually have a nice echo of what's going on in my type down here. So, this will be a different style in terms of contrasts, a high contrast Sans Serif. So, one of the things that I recommend if you're just starting out is to try to limit yourself to working in no more than three styles on any given cover or project. As soon as you start working with more than that, it starts getting really bananas and starts looking like some weird circus poster rather than it being a more sophisticated layout. There are people that can make designs with dozens and dozens of styles and they look really good and cohesive. But that's definitely more of a rare circumstance than the normal. N is too narrow but I'm just going to stretch that guy. I can redraw these things later and make them look nicer. Then I'll read a little bit. Everything's a little bit funky right now because it's still in sketch mode. You can tell that my L Frank Baum is like not entirely the right size, but I'm definitely getting across what I need to get across here. So, at this point, if you guys are playing along with me, I hope that you guys will take layouts that we earlier made and start really mapping out where your types going to go and start making some basic structural decisions based on whether or not you want to use roman letterforms, script letterforms, whether those are going to be serif or sans-serif. If you're going to use serifs, what serifs are going to use and how you're going to apply weight to those letterforms. Now that we have a really good idea of where our lettering is going to end up or at least the basic structure of where our lettering is going to end up, we're going to start on our color sketch. We're going to map in our color and figure out what components are going to be utilizing which colors in our layout and a lot of that's going to depend on what illustration we have, what our concept is. Then after that we're going to be talking about type decoration and how to really make this thing feel rich and crazy, based on the constraints that we have with the foils that we have and also based on the style that we're going after conceptually.
12. Choose Your Colors: Now that we have the basics of our sketch and lettering done, we are going to start talking about some of the details. We are going to talk about color, and we're going to talk about how to really make this rich, add our illustrations, add some decorative elements. So, color is something that at this stage of the game, it's important to start thinking about. Mostly because if we have a really limited color palette, we're going to have to make some decisions just based on making sure that our type and lettering can show up in the forefront, and also based on just how much foil coverage that we have. One of the things that we talked about was making decisions based on color depending on what kind of illustrations you need to have as a part of your book cover. So, in this case, I know that I want to have both the yellow brick road and Emerald City, which I already know then means that two of my foil colors or one of my background colors needs to be green and some kind of yellow. Now, I think yellow and green, if I just did a sort of more flat, solid colors, might not look as good together as something like a green metallic, and a yellow, or a green solid, and a metallic gold which could stay in the place of yellow. I could pick a really yellowy gold and have that work. I think mixing together a metallic and non-metallic always looks really good on these covers, so it's something to think about. So, if I know that I'm going to have green for Emerald City, and it's going to be a nice bright green, and I'm going to have this metallic yellow gold for the yellow brick road, that doesn't leave me with a ton of options for my background color. Ultimately, I think I'm going to need something that's deeper. It's going to be a lot darker than those to foil colors, or something that's a lot lighter than those two foil colors, and I think in general, it's going to look better if I choose a darker color. The other option would be to choose a very bright yellow or pastel yellow to work, but I don't know if that appeals to me quite as much green and yellow as the primary color. Instead, I think what I'm going to do is either choose to have my background color be black, or to have it be like a deeper, richer green than what I'm using for Emerald City. Why don't we go ahead and set that as that deep, rich green because if I use black right now, I wouldn't actually be able to see my sketch on top of it. There we go. Something that's nice, and rich, and dark, perfect. So, while my type is black right now, it's not ultimately going to end up being black because that would add a third foil color to this whole situation. So, now I'm going to decide which of these I want to be which colors. Clearly, if our Emerald City is going to go in front of Oz, that's going to have to be in the lighter green tone. So, let's go ahead, and make something that is sort of a lighter emerald bright green color. Here we go. Now, what I can do is just sketch that in for now, it doesn't have to be perfect. Now, one of the things to think about when you are dealing with foil is that, you don't want to overprint your foils on top of each other very much. There's actually a huge margin for error if you are doing that. Every time that you apply a foil color, it's applied with heat onto the cover, and the heat helps transfer it onto there. You know how the foil will interact with the base because they'll do tests for it, but how it will interact on top of another foil. It might pull up some of that original foil by reheating it, it might expand in different ways when printed right on top of the foil, so you just have to be really careful. So, you are going to be safer if you have them next to each other or near each other, but not directly overprinting each other. So, one of the things that you can think about when you're illustrating with foil is really playing with positive and negative space. So, when it comes to actually illustrating the bricks of the yellow brick road, rather than using my green foil to draw those lines, I'll just erase into my foil stamp. So, then it's actually the background that's showing through to create those lines rather than me drawing lines on top of that foil. I thought what would be a really interesting idea, and a way to tie in this yellow brick road into the rest of the book is to actually go ahead and make a yellow brick border around our entire cover. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that before I start erasing individual bricks. All right. So, now I've got my yellow brick border and my yellow brick road. I still have these like medallions in the corner that I want to put my illustration in. I think because my two colors are this gold and what could be also a metallic green, I might make these solid, and make it feel like the illustrations are actually done in a mosaic style, or knocked out of that solid color. So, let's just go ahead, and at least add a brick border to these. Now, let's go ahead and start erasing our bricks to get this to actually read. Too heavy. One of the things to consider when you are working with foil is to make sure that you work with a minimum line weight for all of your art. That minimum line weight is going to be generally a 0.25 of point, but that's going to expand, and you should talk to whoever is managing the production of a project that you are working on just to see if they have a threshold. When foil goes down on almost any surface, it'll expand a bit. So, for instance, these gaps here in my bricks, when that gold foil hits the cover, it's actually going to be a little bit bolder than it is, which if my lines in between them are too thin, it could just fill in. So, if you have time, and if the budget allows, you can actually test it first, and test your cover through and see how much you have to change it, but a lot of times these sorts of covers are printing overseas, and you're not able to really get a lot of proofs in advance. So, you have to sort of understand what their thresholds are before you actually send something to print. All right. Now, for our actual pathway, I want to make sure that I add a border to it and not just have it be bricks because I think that will make it feel nicer, and more realistic. Again, you just really have to make sure that your minimum line weight even as you get really tight here doesn't change very much. Awesome, cool. So, I'm just going to turn off my sketches of my type for a second, so we can see how this is looking just with the border. Right now, we only have one area where we're using this green foil. I like to look for places where we can integrate it everywhere else in our layout. One of the things that I can think about is that I have currently, these bricks are very solid and geometric, and that really reminds me of what's going on with some of the sans serif type. So, I don't have a lot of information going so far about what's going on with the green, but maybe we can use that for more delicate scripty stuff. So, let's go ahead and pull up our type sketch. I'm going to make my Wizard and my Oz gold, and then we're going to make our The and Of in the smaller type green, and then we'll figure out how to get some green around Wizard and Oz just through adding some details. One of the features that you may have seen me turn on and off in this program is this thing called streamline. You can actually edit your brushes, and within each brush, there is this feature. Turning up streamline means that the program will try to smooth out your line for you, which can be really great if you are working on scripts, but it's really terrible if you're coloring things in. So, I play with the streamline depending on whether I'm trying to draw a swash, or if I'm actually trying to color it in. I'm going to keep on with my illustrations and my border for now, and then we are going to talk about marrying the type and the illustrations together.
13. Add Final Ornamentation: All right. Now, because there's a give-and-take relationship with the illustration and the type lettering, I can choose to either have the illustration being formed by the lettering, or the lettering being formed by the illustration. I tend to go back and forth. So, I'll get an idea of what I want the illustration to look like, and then based on that style, I'll pull in the line quality to the type. Or if I know for sure that I want to have some ornamental thing going on with the lettering, I'll make sure that I'm using the same line quality for the illustration. In this case, I'm just going to keep going with the illustration to see how far we could take it. I think getting some more green into the border will really help tie all this together, and also we have these really delicate scripts, and I would love to add more of that line quality into what's going on in the border. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do is maybe make some little starbursts in these smaller shapes, so that we can get a bit of that foil going on in our border. All right. Next what I want to do is get this border to feel a little bit more intricate, rather than it feeling just like a brick masonry wall. So, I'm going to add a thin green border along the whole thing. Now, if I feel like going totally bananas, I can just start adding some flourishes willy-nilly here. I might do that on a separate layer to see if I like it. But one of the things that I was just thinking about in terms of my script and my flourishes that I have is that, I wonder if there's a way for them to tie-in conceptually in that if there's enough of them, and if they feel really wild and crazy, it could feel almost like the winds of the tornado, and so that's probably how I would talk about it when I was talking with the client. I would have these really wild swashes just all over the place, and the symbolism would be that that's just the crazy tornado, swirling around my type. So now, let's think about what we want to do to make our type special. So, we already have a lot going on in terms of ornaments. So, I have to be really careful about how crazy we go with the type because I really like how we have this very fine ornament, and how the type feels a lot bolder and how it interacts with it. So, maybe it's just about adding a little bit of extra decoration to it. What I think I'll do is I'll end up adding a drop line to this wizard type, which means I'm going to have a thin line that hugs the edge of my type. All right. So, the main reason why I chose to drop line instead of a drop shade or a drop shadow, is that I'm using two different foils that are pretty close in value to one another. So, I don't want to have these two foils next to each other too much, because I feel like it'll vibrate a bit, and it won't actually help with legibility, it might hinder legibility. But if I do a drop line, what I get is a bit of that dark border in between my two foil colors which really lets two elements stand on their own, and it adds this extra level of depth and dimension by just having that separation between the drop line and the type. What's also fun with a drop line is it gives me an opportunity to add some little ornaments off of it. In this case, I'm going to put these little spurs, two at a time, and then I'll go a little wilder with the interior of my O and my Z. Okie dokie. Now, one of the other things that I can do here is I can add some decoration to the inside of my letter forms. One of the easier ways to do it is to do an internal linelike that. Then, because our O and Z are a little bit bigger, I don't think it would look quite the same If I just put a single line in my O and Z, I think it actually might end up looking like we're using a font at different sizes. With lettering, what you want is for everything to feel like it's drawn custom in that particular place. So, I'm going to do a similar ornament, working with internal lines, but I'm probably going to do a double within this one, and we're going to see how that looks. So, because of the and of, we're getting a little lost in all my ornament. I also added a gold drop line on those to help them stand out. I'm not going to add that to the rest of my flourishes, because that'll help those flourishes recede. So, next I finally have to determine what my illustrations are going to be in the corners. So, I want then to represent the things that each of the characters are seeking. For Dorothy it's home, for the lion's it's courage, for the tin man it's a hard, and for the scarecrow it's a brain. So, how can we represent those in ways that aren't so literal? I think home we do have to represent it slightly literally, maybe showing the barn or the farm, and I have to figure out what I'm going to do in terms of how it's positioned within that corner, because that's going to apply for all of them. I think that just having them straight on might make sense for some but not for all, and having them tilt out or tilt into the illustration might feel a little bit more dynamic. So, why don't we start with that. If I want to make it really symmetrical, I can have some of the things appear here be upside down, and these be right-side-up. So, actually everything sort of pointing towards the center. So, one of the things that I can think about is what things are going to be the most recognizable when they're upside down. I think something like using a book to represent a brain, that could work for that. I could do a bunch of brainstorming about what is a brain, because I certainly don't want to just draw a brain in the corner of this book, because I think that might feel really weird and not really jive with the overall look of this. So, why don't I start with that, and we can get that in one of these upper corner since a book can be read in either direction. Finally, our heart, and let's do a bit of a hybrid symbol slash realistic heart here. Well, there you have it, our first color comp to send off to our publisher. I feel very good about it. So, I hope that you guys are all having a lot of fun doing your sketches, and I can't wait to see what some of those colors sketches look like. I really hope that you guys can take it as far as you can.
14. Final Thoughts: So, now that we have our color sketch, what I would do, if I were working for a client, is I would send this along and ask for any opinions that they have, and wait for approval to actually turn it into final art. Usually, there's going to be a little bit of feedback coming back from the client, maybe they want me to reposition some of these icons, maybe they feel like my blood drops are little too much. But there's going to be something that happens that is going to be given some kind of feedback that I'm going to get before I actually want to jump into final. When I'm working on my final, what I'm going to do is bring this sketch into Illustrator and trace directly on top of it. Depending on what's happening in my illustration, I'm going to use different methods to do so. For my wizard and my oz, I'm probably just going to trace the outlines of those rather than starting with stroke. But for my ornamentation, those are probably going to be drawn with stroke using the width variation tool as a part of that. I have a ton of experience doing vector art, you guys might not be as comfortable working in vector. If you feel that your sketch is worth digitizing final exactly as is, if you did what I did, working on an iPad, sketching on different layers, or working in analog and using different sheets of paper to represent those different colors, you just scan those in, and live trace them. If you feel like your work is ready to roll, depending on the production method, it's going to forgive a lot of inconsistencies and it's going to actually look pretty awesome. I always find that hand-drawn work when translated to foil or letterpress looks super good. So, don't feel like you have to vectorize these, if your hand drawings looks super. That's only if you feel like that's a part of your process and it adds to the piece rather than subtracts from the piece. So, once you have your final cover art, there's a couple of bonus projects that you could give yourself to really blow this out into a huge project. You can go one route, which is to make this into the full collector's edition version, in which you have your cover which you can then simplify to create a title page by stripping away a lot of the exterior ornamentation and trying to just make the type work on its own without as much of the illustration. You can do chapter titles that are based on some of the styles that you used within your cover, or you can do full page chapter opener spreads, in which you're incorporating a lot of illustration instead of just having those little smaller chapter titles. You can also think about endpapers. If you have a lot of ornament or a live illustration on your cover, how would that ornament or illustration translate into an endpaper, or do you want to do something that's totally contrasting that just uses a pattern that you had written down somewhere else in your notes? So, that's one way to take it. The other way to take it would be thinking about taking this cover and turning it into a series. What are some other books related to the book that you chose? Could you do other book covers in a similar style and with similar level of decoration that you can then do as a three book series? A lot of times that first book is going to be the thing that influences so much of what's to come. With this book, The Wizard of Oz, I set up some rules for myself. I added these four illustrations in the corner, and if I was going to use this layout for a different book, I certainly wouldn't be using the exact same illustrations, but maybe having these corner illustrations would make sense in a way that applied to a different book. Of course, the type style might not be consistent from book to book, but maybe just the way that the type is handled, and the level of ornamentation that could be really similar, or even just the fact that this is a very symmetrical layout. Using that and implementing it across several books could turn this single cover into a series. So, I really hope that you guys share some of the work that you made while working alongside me in this course. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Of course feel free to put it up there in progress. It's always great to get feedback while you're working, and I just can't wait to see what you guys have come up with.
15. Bonus: Skillshare Short with Jessica Hische: Mostly I think what I love is that letters are these bare-bone structures that can be anything. It's about like thousands of small decisions that you make that impacts what this thing can be. I just think it's so fascinating, that you can start with a thing that everyone recognizes. But there's millions of different paths that you can take to make that thing into a final piece of our work. My name is Jessica Hische, and I'm the lettering artist and author and illustrator living here in Oakland. Ever since I moved to Oakland, I have been still working at the studio in San Francisco, but I'm not there every day. I pretty much go into the studio four days a week, though it's going to change a little bit now that my daughter is in preschool. I'm a weirdo that has always been super into commuting because I feel like it allows me to start my day with some chill brain time rather than immediately having to be at my office and dive right into it. That person was the most polite California driver ever because usually, people speed up as soon as you put your turn signal on. I went to school in Philadelphia, and all of the designers that I graduated with, a lot of people left, people left to go to New York or they left to go to LA. Around me, wasn't actually a lot of my classmates that were designers. It was actually all the freelance illustrators that lived in Philly, which I think really shifted what I wanted to get out of my career just because I saw this model of what work could be, which was to work on things that you wanted to work on at any given point. To maybe have a studio. To maybe work from your house. I saw people planning their families and doing things like that, and just that flexibility just seem so romantic to me. When I was thinking about the future, I was like, I think I'm going to be a freelance illustrator. This was my very first business card that I made, which I printed as three-color letterpress. It was a very fancy business card. I've done a ton of papyrus cards and these are one of the things that, when you see them in person, they are a lot more impressive than when you see the digital files. They always go like way crazier on effects than I ever would. This one is really cool because it's very much just based on Daily Drop Cap. When Daily Drop Cap launched, my freelance work hadn't totally transitioned to being lettering work yet. I started Daily Drop Cap as a way to make sure that every day I was still exercising this muscle. That every day I got to show up in my office and make letters even if I wasn't getting paid to do it. I ended up getting pushed to the far corners of the Internet much farther than I thought it would ever get pushed. Which for something that's like so specific is crazy. I started getting interviewed a lot for it, which then translated into, you want to come speak at our conference and talk about this. Then once I was on the conference stage then that opened up my work to a lot of different people too. Ever since that project has launched, I've gotten a ton of work because people will reference it. Here we go. Much has come from that. Something that started as just like an exercise, a way for me to just make something every day became this thing that launched my career really. Do you see how many layers that can cast? One, two, three. Yeah, three layers. What cake do you like? Chocolate. Chocolate cake, is that your favorite cake? Yeah. When I had my daughter, I feel like I did need a creative wake-up call. I ended up taking on a lot of work that was really well-paying. That was pretty exciting. But not stuff that was necessarily like these smaller passion projects. Then I became so conscious of my time, especially once I had my daughter, where any time that I was working, I was like, I need to be doing work that makes money. When money is a concern, and this happens when people have really high student loan debt and stuff like that too, is that you may just make really safe choices. You feel like you can't experiment and you can't do stuff that's crazy and that you can't just like mess around on a given Wednesday on some piece that you might not even turn into anything. But I was like, no wonder I feel this weird tension with my work because I'm not putting myself out there and making stuff. I'm excited. Looks good to me. Thanks again. Suddenly I had this like, oh my god, I need to make time to make work. Right at that moment is when I actually bought this letterpress that I now have at my home studio. In buying this press, even though it was outrageously expensive, it made the friction to me making personal work that I just felt like making so much lower. Then anytime that I got an idea for like, oh, that phrase is just stuck in my head, I'm going to make a piece of art on that on my iPad this morning, and then I'm going to send that art away to get it made into a plate this afternoon. I'm going to pick up that plate tomorrow, and I'm going to print it tomorrow night. Suddenly it became so easy to do something that felt so hard. I think it's really important when you are feeling stuck to look for what is getting you stuck and try to grease that wheel, just to get you working again. Looks pretty good. All of a sudden, I didn't feel like victimized by my position as a parent or by wanting to keep up financially. It became like, no, I can do what I want because really that's what got me here in the first place is actually just making work that I was interested in. If I just try to like put on my soundproofs or headphones and just don't listen to what people are asking you to do and listen to what I want to do. It's that work that ends up moving my career forward. My whole life, all I'm trying to do is make the time that I'm spending feel valuable to me. If I wanted to make sure that I'm enjoying every moment, and it's less about what the end result is and more just about what the individual moments are that you can stitch together over time. [inaudible]. As I have been told by people that's how Zen works. All successes are a happy accident that happened just because you're doing your thing, and if you love doing your thing, then you've lived a good life.
16. More Design Classes on Skillshare: way.
Jessica Hische, Letterer and Illustrator
