Book Publishing

My Role: Contributions include creative direction; staff and resource management; final approval; budgeting.

Notes: This 28-page, full-color book was created as part of a kids program offered by Siemens for its pediatric fittings.

The book was illustrated by a teenager with no former professional experience. This meant that my department had to ensure that what made it to press was a professional looking finished product. Several things were done to enhance the illustrations and create a more homogenous look.

First, the images needed to be color corrected so that the palette was consistent throughout the book. Some airbrushing and modifications were required to ensure that fine details weren't lost and printed correctly. In certain cases, changes had been made to physical product requiring us to alter the illustrations to match.

Since the images provided were of different sizes and shapes, it was necessary to make them all proportional within a one or two page format. To solve this problem, we cropped the images using a soft marker edge. Each image actually worked much better with this framing than if we had gone with full bleeds. It's amazing how much more finished this type of simple frame can make a piece of art look.

A paw print was copied from one of the images then used as a repeated design element throughout the book. This step really helped to tie everything together.

For anyone who's worked with me before, you know that I'm a real stickler for typesetting -- kerning and leading in particular. With this sort of kids book, that fact became even more of an issue. The reason being that children's books have less words in them and the printed text is large on the page. Therefore, it's important to make sure that you're using kerning tables for correct spacing of letters. There's nothing worse than a giant "W" poorly kerned next to an equally large "O". Poor typesetting can be evident in this situation even to someone who has no formal training.