Little Brown Book Project - Marketing and Studio Visit

I have been to London to show several marketing directors my seven book cover designs for the Josie Dew Cycling Books project I have been working on. While I was there, I had a look around the building that Little Brown were stationed at. I was very surprised that there were so many employees in such a small company. It was a giant office with many people working on different things, some putting books together, others designing the actual books, it was really amazing to see! I spoke to one of the designers who was in the middle of designing a thriller book. 

They were working on Photoshop with one of those drawing tablets. She showed me some of the recent books she had designed and they all looked really different, yet intricate. Some had some funny illustrative characters, some were very dark and eerie, it was clear that most of the artists here don't have one particular style, they adapt to suit the content being made. She showed me a list of books that need to be made for a certain date (about two months away) and there were about 20 that needed to be made. I thought it would be very stressful buts he said she gets sent ideas of how they want it to look, the problem is that sometimes there are so many different ideas suggested, it can be difficult to understand which design they actually want. I asked her if she ever takes anything home or if it is all done at work. She said that luckily she never needs to work from home, it's all done during office hours, and that it is good to have a break from it as with anything.

As for showing work to the team, it was very scary! I assumed there would just be a few people but there was a giant roundtable and about 15 different people, they started saying "Hello I'm the marketing director for Waterstones" etc. I didn't expect this many, but I explained my work and why I designed them the way I did and it went ok. I was very lucky to get this oppertunity, but where it will go from here I do not know yet, but it was a really great experience!

Portfolio Review - Little Brown Book Publishers

I travelled to Blackfriars in London to visit the studio of Little Brown Book Publishing. (see separate blog entry). While I was there, Hannah Wood took a look at my portfolio. It was quite nerve wracking to go into an industry head-first with about 10 marketing directors waiting to see the book designs I had made. Hannah and a lady that was with her sat and waited for me to tell them about each piece of work. I'd never professionally explained each piece of art I had done until this point, it was even more scary trying to talk through the silence of them.

Overall they seemed to like my work, there was a tight schedule, and my portfolio review overran so I had to make haste, keeping it short but sweet. They said that it was a good idea that I chose to put drawings into the portfolio, because far too often do people slam all their best final work into a portfolio and sometimes it can be difficult to see where a certain brief could have gone if they had done things differently. Showing some decent rough work allows them to see the foundations of where a project could potentially go.

They thought my Animals in Anguish characters were a little "extreme" but I explained that it was because I was trying to make an extreme point and 'shock' the audience. They saw this with reason but I do acknowledge that some people could seem offended or shocked by these characters, but this is what I wanted them to feel.

Little Brown Book - Mockups

After a few weeks of designing, I have 'beta' versions of the book covers.

Looking at these from far away, I want to get rid of the bikes in the background, it was used to show that the book is about bikes, and was a way of synergising consistency between them all, but it looks too much like a watermark of some sort.

Little Brown Book Project - Working Progress

A few weeks into the project and here is whats what. There have been a lot of different designs going on, just playing around with different approaches and methods.

For this, I drew a picture of the USA and used a characterful type, it's probably a bit simple, but simple is simple for a reason, it works in it's own way. It's sometimes nice to start again on a white piece of paper and start from scratch.

It's fun to get carried away with bikes!

Tried to work with bigger imagery but it looks a bit too much like someone projectile vomited a premature version of a final design onto here.

Little Brown Book - Feedback

I have shown my work to Little Brown Publishing and they were quite surprised by the work of everyone. Their advice to me was to continue to work with shape and try to forge a concept of using the whole page (front, back and middle), as they particularly would like to see imagery that fills the whole page and not just separate to the front or back, this is an idea I agreed with as I have done this in the past for projects such as The Wind in the Willows, where I have used the double page to plant a whole scene.

They also recommend I work with a Graphic Design student to combine a suitable typeface with my designs, I don't always like working with others as I feel I can think better in my own head and like to think I'd be fine finding a good typeface, but having someone else to bounce ideas and combine thoughts is always good and it will be interesting to work with someone I don't know and hasn't had the same design experience. 

I am going to continue to think about the layout of the page and how this can be used to an advantage, instead of sticking to just using each page separate. I also think that if I use shape in each design and stick to my style, I will have automatically kept the synergy going and that will be the common basis for the 7 designs. 

Little Brown Book Publishing - Basic Designs

After spending some time on forging a few ideas for the Little Brown Book Publishing brief, I have come up with a few designs for several books. I am trying to create a synergy between the books, but not keep them too similar, because they are not a 'collection' but a series of books, and so I want them each to be very different but keep a design consistency throughout.

The last design 'A Ride in the Neon Sun' has taken inspiration from one of my pieces I did earlier in "The Wind in the Willows", I kept the idea of using transparency to give a 3d effect of distance in the image. These are all just very basic starts, but I will gradually introduce detail and use my own drawings in the imagery.

I am going to show these to the Little Brown Book Publishing agency when they visit and see what they think to the ideas.

Little Brown Book Project, Initial Ideas and Thought Processing

Trying to come up with a few starting points for book designs for Little Brown Book Publishing, the Josie Dew character seems to be very funny and spontaneous, so I had an idea of making her bike look ridiculous as I could imagine her to be carrying lots of luggage and have a basket with lots of items shoved in, like buckets and spades, sleeping bags and umbrellas.

I have also started to implement the typeface I made, but it doesn't seem to be working too well, making a typeface is quite difficult and seems to look better on paper as an alphabet than put with a design. Going to continue to work on these and play around more with shape.

Little Brown Book Publishing Project

I have been given a chance to design sever book covers for a series of books for Little Brown Book Publishing. The books are by an auther called Josie Dew who has travelled all around the world on a bicycle, the stories seem to be very crazy and funny as she goes anywhere and everywhere on her bike, and it will be a fun and interesting experience to design the covers for these!

I really want the designs to reflect my style of work, as well as Josie Dew's humour. I'd want her to appreciate the thought of design behind the book covers. 

I wanted to start off by making a typeface just to see what it's like (and how difficult it is!) I thought this threaded typeface I designed might look good on the designs, but we'll see..