This is the beginning of a new week, which means a new boss for me at Penguin. This week I'm working with a very pleasant art director and we are focusing on "book covers/the design process." How cool is that?! Right away I was assigned to jump onto a project with a designer. I wish I could go into detail about the concept and the book etc. because it is a really cool thing, but alas, it's still under wraps. I am, however, happy to report that a ton of my training, work experience, and academic history came into play today. I thought it might be useful for design/illustration students to know what kinds of skills I used today alone, just so that maybe any thoughts of "I'll probably never use this" can be replaced with "holy cow I could totally use this!" At the very least somebody might wonder what one of these things are and look it up or ask about it and learn. In photoshop I used drawing skills, textured brushes, my wacom tablet, masks, styles, brush styles, rulers, content aware, define pattern/custom brushes, and export to web/devices. In Illustrator I used the pen tool, pathfinder, stroke ends, offset path, and type setting. In InDesign I used rulers, paragraph styles, and the links pallet. In this project the art director referred to several types of traditional medias. Imitating traditional medias digitally is a norm in publishing. Oh yes and mock ups. It is important to make well crafted mock ups for your bosses. Today, that included cutting out covers and gluing them on to existing books with the same dimensions.
One of the books we are designing has "french flaps" which, as you see here, are fold ins from the back and front covers of a paperback book. It is a little bit pricier and is reserved for special publications.
Some books are intended to be sold as "gifts." These are extra fun because they are typically more artistic and include designing a hard case or "sleeve" for the book to be in. This is an image of a UK edition of Peter Pan that is a gift book.
Tomorrow is "launch", which I will expound upon another day, but that made today pretty hectic. It was awesome to feel needed and helpful to the team.
Some cool things about NYC and Penguishing. These massive in house printers are calibrated to match the prints from the printing company. This way, final mock ups can be pretty true to final product. Very helpful!
Penguin has vending machines and the snacks within cost less than the ones at BYU-I. What...the...heck? C'mon BYU-I, don't you know we are students!?
A few things stood out to me right away as I work today. 1. This place assumes that I am competent. I report my hours at the end of the week, and nobody is standing over my shoulder.
2. They give me tasks with confidence that I can accomplish them. It is my responsibility to ask questions if I have questions, or to figure it out. They are more than happy to answer questions, but they dont' walk you through anything.
3. Production experience is an absolute must. Nomenclature is important. File formats are important. Resolution and image size is important. Familiarity with filing and universal drives is important. I used to think of these things as a bother because it felt mildly mathematical. It is true that it is, but design with improper production is like eating through your ear hole. The stuff might be good, but it sure aint' gonna get where it needs to go, or accomplish what it is meant to accomplish.
4. Talking to a designer today, she explained how she has a degree in fine arts and that she wants to be an illustrator someday. However, she worked for 3 years as a production designer and she has finally worked her way up to have the opportunity to be a designer with some creative license. It just started to dawn on me that a career as an artist comes with a price. To some, that price is paid in tireless hours of drawing and painting. To others, it is years of drab design work executing somebody else's ideas. However, if you stick with it, you can end up with a creative career. Just don't give up, and never assume that you don't have to put in the years of drudgery because somebody else will and will earn it over you.
The Upper New York Bay, just a couple of blocks from work.
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