Original Content London

Sketches...

The problem I’ve been tackling of late is how to convey to the reader which of the songbook’s characters is speaking at any one point without having to rely on writing their names constantly next to the relevant text.

So….I started thinking about FONTS with the intention of attributing each character their own one with it’s style dictated by variables such as their personality type, temperament, education, background etc etc.For example the character of the scientist I had imagined (along with the character description given to me by Ed) to be Germanic in origin…so that became my starting point for my search for his font. The General’s wife was described to me as being rather ‘prim and proper’, middle class and educated, so again, this aided me in finding an appropriate font for her.

The fonts will probably be first associated with each character within a group picture/illustration that will be featured in the beginning pages of the book. With each character’s portrait labeled with their name in their chosen style lettering.

After finding the fonts I began contemplating the layout in a much more serious manner, as I have spent the last few weeks looking at research an have got a rather good clue about how I want all of this to end up looking. The most important thing is being able to convey to printers (whom I have not yet approached) as best an idea as possible of what we are looking to create. This entails putting together storyboards of how we would like each page to be laid out as well as the style of illustrations, print type, colours and things like what paper we will require.

I would like to mention that the preparation requirements of aforementioned layout have been helped along and will be helped along by two sterling young fellows at http://www.igloowebdesign.com/ whom have very kindly agreed to let me ask them a lot of questions and then give me a lot of answers. Their names are Oliver Lockett and Mike Scott. Mike studied book design for his BA and Oliver has a good few years of dealing with printers under his belt. Together they make up part of Team Awesome when it comes to helping me make this project feel very real and realisable.

I also had a good chat about programme use with Mr Simon Fox (thanks!).

Right so, where I am now is I have a layout idea and need to draw up an example of one of the illustrations that will be featured in the book (the style that I draw in will dictate the print type ie bitmap, full colour or vector graphics). This in turn will effect which printer we will use. I have already started some sketching but this is serious drawing time. Hopefully with this done I can approach printers sometime next week……..WATCH THIS SPACE.

Layouts

la xx

This entry was posted on 25 March 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under The Clockwork Quartet Storybook . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.