In my previous post about CBT I talked about the process of creating the logo(s) and covers for the book. With that aspect of the project finished, we felt fairly confident that we were on the right track, and that there was a solid visual basis established to design the rest of the book.
I remember it was around March — Liz and I were in Kuala Lumpur to celebrate our recent wedding with her family — when I got an email from Rantz Hoseley (the fearless editor, remember?): it turned out the printers had miscalculated their initial production timeline. When the project started they had told us multiple times that they needed to go to print at the end of May, to make the July deadline of having the book on the shelves. Now it turned out they actually meant mid-April. WONDERFUL (and we still didn’t have the art for the book)! Luckily Rantz and the guys at Image managed to squeeze some extra time out of the printers which gave us until the end of April to get everything ready. Not great, but it gave us some breathing room.
This meant of course that a lot of my initial ideas for the book design had to be canned due to time restrictions. Rantz had worked out a structure in the book where each story would have an uneven number of pages, with 1 page added for the song lyrics and creator credits per story. Each story would start with a credit/lyrics page on the left, art on the right. With that knowledge I had started experimenting with Jason Levesque’s tattoo patterns (again, check the previous post) to create random patterns to be used for the credits, so each story would have a unique design. Due to the time constraints I had to look for a more standardized solution.
Page pattern sketch
Because the book is all about music (or at least based on music lyrics) I wanted to keep a certain style to the design of the credits page, similar to liner notes/lyrics you’d get in a CD booklet — while adding the style elements that we’d created during the logo & cover design process (i.e. using our chosen fonts and colours).
Lyrics page test
In the initial design I tried to weasel in my circle again, but as you can see it was too restrictive, especially if a story had a creative team of more than 2 people — and it just looked like I was trying too hard to come up with someting “cool”, rather than be informative. The design of the page shouldn’t try to upstage the art. So after a few more revisions and finetuning the design we settled on, what I feel, was quite a successful layout.
Lyrics/credits page — final design
The page follows a 2 column grid, with the title and creator credits centered at the left hand side with a tattoo pattern strip running along the side, bleeding off the page. A faint half-circle sits behind the text to create a stylistic connection to a 12″ album sleeve gutter. The right column would obviously contain the lyrics and was flexible enough to accomodate longer text so it could be split in two smaller ones. All credit for that goes to Liz who took my loose ideas and finetuned them to make it actually work!
Page spread with lyrics column split
This approach would be applied throughout the book preceding every story — and we’d apply a reversed colour scheme to the editorial pages to create a strong distinction between the two and create a start and stop to the book.
Masthead & Introduction spread preceding the stories
Afterword & editorial spread following the stories
So far so good! While Liz and I were working on the “skeleton” pages of the book, Rantz was working overtime at his side of the world — figuring out the running order of the stories and making sure everyone on the project, which included over 80 creators, was on the same wavelength. The deadline for the creators to deliver their stories was April 15th, which gave us around a week to drop in the 450+ pages of art in the book, which seemed simple enough at the time.
April 15th was approaching very quick and working with Rantz we had laid out the complete running order of the book. However, we realized we had way too much content and not enough pages: we had been too generous in our allowances for the editorial pages.
Since the whole project had already been budgetted and there was absolutely no room for expansion we all went back to the drawing board to figure out how to fix this — getting rid of all unnecessary content. This luckily proved to be fairly painless: we dramatically trimmed down the creator biography pages and rearranged the rest of the editorial pages to make it all work.
Finally, on the 15th of April we had all the artwork for the book. Everything had been arriving in little bits over the past week — with pages and folders appearing on Rantz’s fileserver hour after hour, so we finally set to work checking everything and adding all the pages to the book. After a few more revisions and checks from the whole team at Image and Tori it was all good to go to print.
Ah, but the printer was in China, and the Image team needed to be able to make last minute adjustments to the book (mostly adding legalese and minor non-design issues), so they needed the raw InDesign files. Since time was really, really short now and only we had the final art files (because we’d flattened and converted the majority of the pages) there was no time to upload all 50GB of art back to the server for Image to then download it again. Nothing a few DVDs of data and FedEx couldn’t handle. So, right on schedule Image got the files and everything was sent to the printer! Yay, job done!
Now that the book was in production we could all catch our breath and look at what else needed to be done: the marketing stuff. Convention season was looming in America and there was a need for a set of collateral material to support the book at retailer and consumer level: everything from in-store posters, free giveaways, stickers, temporary tattoos and bookmarks had to be produced. This proved to be the easiest part of the job because by now we’d developed the whole language of the book — so it was just a case of applying it to the various materials needed, which you can see in full here.
Finally, 550+ emails and 2 months later Comic Book Tattoo was launched at the Sand Diego Comic-Con with incredible success — it was the biggest thing at the convention right behind the Watchmen Movie news. Not bad for an independent book!
It goes without saying that Liz and I wouldn’t have been able to do this on our own, so a big thanks has to go out to the Image team and Traci & Alan Hui in particular who made sure everything went as planned. And of course thanks to Rantz for letting us design “his baby”.
Now go out and buy the new Special Edition slipcased hardcover release of Comic Book Tattoo, available from the 19th of November!