reMIND

By Christopher Kosek

Here’s the thing about your graphic novel or any other personal project. No one in this world will care about it more than you. It’s your labor of love, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be mine. When you ask someone to collaborate with you you’re asking for a big favor. You’re asking for all of their free time for the next few weeks/months. Unless you have lots of cash and are willing to pay a designer his/her rate, you’re basically asking them to put in dozens of hours of free work for your personal project. Its best if you already have a relationship with the designer, but if you don’t it’s still possible to collaborate. Its tough, so you have to make sure that there is something in it for the designer. Lots of creative control, bartering or trading services…those all work and something that Jason and I agreed upon. I love designing books, and I wanted to get on some really sweet projects. Working in a professional design agency, there is a lot of collaboration. The final work never belongs to any one person which can be great but also frustrating. In my personal work, I wanted something that i could take ownership of and that I could proudly put my name on and I can’t stress this enough, design and production is NOT easy. It’s very time consuming…just as much as writing and drawing your graphic novel, so keep that in mind during the entire relationship. Make sure you give your designer lots of time, especially if the pay isn’t there. No designer likes the pushy and demanding client, especially when they are barely paying.

Jason Brubaker – I want to chime in here because I agree 100% with Chris. If you want someone else to work on YOUR project then you have to make it worth their time. And none of this I’ll-pay-you-back-when-it-gets-big crap. Put your money (or something equal in value) where your mouth is.

Here’s the hard part. I think the key is to find someone that is WAY better than you are in their field. I have a hard time justifying collaboration with anyone who is not a professional at the job you are giving them. In finding someone who is obviously professional, you will naturally trust them and their decisions. They will foresee problems and raise red flags if they see something that experience tells them is wrong.  I jumped at the opportunity to have Chris design my book because his portfolio speaks for itself.

So how do you find someone professional to work on your project? The trick is to find someone that LOVES what you are doing before you ask them. Chris was commenting on my blog for months. When I saw that an amazing designer was also interested in my book, I would have been stupid to not ask. I could tell that he was drawn to it and I knew he would treat it with respect. The last thing you want is to bring someone onboard who doesn’t really care about your project. Now, back to Chris.

Research

A lot of design happens outside of software. I was thinking about design ideas and approaches for weeks before I sat down and moved a mouse. Jason and I sent each other links and images. I photographed books and graphic novels that I owned and showed him. I poured over my art book collection looking for different approaches and inspiration for things like title pages and information organization….we were researching. Jason set up a google docs with schedules and a breakdown map of what was going to go on each page. It was the only way to stay on track and stay organized.

I’ve never designed anything like this before. I jumped in to this project when Jason was pretty far along. Jason already had an established brand i.e. logo, a website and ideas for a cover design. The natural tendency of many graphic designers is to say “everything you have sucks, let me redo it all from scratch”. They’ll say it nicer, but really it comes down to wanting to make it their own, for no reason other than personal satisfaction…or your design really does suck and they just want to make sure they do their job for you in the best way they can. While it would have been nice to start over (purely to satisfy my own creative needs) Jason already had something that was working on many levels. For his logo, he had told me how he just took the font “IMPACT” and messed with it in photoshop. Now that statement, I have to admit, made me cringe. I’m not usually one to mess with typefaces in that fashion, and being a type snob, Impact is the butt of many a designer joke…but it’s something I knew we could work with. I tried other fonts in that same style, but what Jason has was 75% there and really the best option for what he wanted.

Jason is a talented artist, and I firmly believe that talent can be applied to related fields. He might not have formal training in graphic design, but he has good visual art instincts, so it was easy to take what he had and run with it. We decided the best approach was to redraw and clean up the logo, Which is what I did. I refined the edges, opened up some of the counters, made the letterforms more legible.

I did enough to it, so that it would be print ready, but also to make the letterforms more clearly defined, remove some of the random effects caused by filters and such, and pay attention to the letter spacing. I really like what we came up with. We created a vertical and horizontal lockup which each had their own concerns. I actually had to make the letterforms for “re” different sizes in each respective version so that it made sense visually and looked consistent.

I also designed the Coffee Table Comics logo, which came about by accident. I was flipping around letter forms and it was a Eureka moment! It looks like a cat face! WOW, and it works as a logo too! Sometimes happy accidents happen.

As for the cover, Jason had the art and cloth design pretty early on….months before he met me and posted it online for public opinions.  I liked it a lot, and it was just a matter of scale, proportion and finesse. Initially we had lots of ideas for things to add to the cover….fake Xeric grant award decals, quotes….i think at one point Jason wanted a funny photo of himself in a Sherlock Holmes hat and funny mustache glasses..huh? Sometimes less is more.

Jason Brubaker – That will be for the second book. Haha!

Part of my role was advising Jason on what’s possible or what the process might be. Technical challenges and knowledge of production techniques informs design and should be thought of before you start. What’s the point of spending weeks developing something that you can’t afford to print, or that the printer won’t be able to execute to a high level? A LOT of printing issues are designer solvable…you choose the wrong kind of color swatch, you don’t build to spec, wrong resolution, not understanding the printing process, asking for something that doesn’t exist, etc. Knowledge of the process also helps the print rep deliver you a more accurate quote. You don’t want to be surprised with an extra line item once you are on the press because you made assumptions.

On finding a printer.

You could write a thesis on this but in short there are LOTS of printers in this world. Some are great, most are ok and they all have business segments that they specialize in. They will all tell you they can print your book, cause they want your business, but the quality, attention to detail, and relationship with finishing vendors is so important. You don’t want to print with a company that does mostly direct mail, or club fliers. You want someone who does fine printing and that does book printing on a regular basis. If they work with design agencies or publishers thats a good sign. You need to ask for samples and referrals. There are enough forums like www.makinggraphicnovels.com where you can find some good recco’s for a good printer.

One major thing for a printer is to find someone who offers high quality print and binding services. Most times they will outsource to one of their trusted vendors. Yes they mark this service up to you, but you MUST go through the printer directly because they are the quality control and they have relationships, discounts and scheduling prioritization you can’t get on your own. Lets say you are diligent and you get a good quote on binding at one place and printing at another. You can tell the vendors and they will work together to ship the book blocks to the binder. But then something happens. The binder screws up and binds your book backwards. You’re really upset and need it re-done. Well since you didn’t go through the printer, their role is over. You can’t rebind it, you need to reprint and rebind. The printer delivered their product and you’re left holding the $10k bag for an incorrectly bound book. Maybe if they are generous they’ll cut you a 20% discount to reprint. Maybe you can spend the next 8 weeks doing a back and forth high stress finger pointing fight and get an ulcer or you can have fun selling your car to fix someone else’s mistake. If you let the printer handle all of the binding and subcontracting, they are responsible for the final product. Anything that goes wrong with any part of it is their responsibility to fix. Its insurance and logistics that you don’t have to deal with.

In a lot of ways a printer is a collaborator if you have a good dialog with them, but in other ways, they can only output what you give them and they can only care so much about your project. The average print rep at a moderately busy printer is juggling dozens of clients at once. Even though I’m not a betting man, I’d be willing to wager that anyone self publishing a graphic novel is not going to be considered a “major client” by a print shop… not unless you’re doing 50,000+ copies on a regular basis. Not to scare you or infer a lack of professionalism on a printer’s part, but no one will ever care about your project more than you will. Only you can find those typos and do the proper production work and have the highest standards for the final printed piece in your hands. You can ask your print rep for some advice on production issues, but they will only give you so much info. They’re not going to teach you all about designing your book for print. They won’t hold your hand or do it for you. Well, not unless you pay them all kinds of money. You need to learn this yourself or better, collaborate with someone that knows about this stuff. Ask them for their specs, file prep guidelines and color profiles early on. Every printer is different with this stuff.

We talked to the printer early, we sent them mockups to get their opinion on production cost and feasibility. The biggest rookie mistake in print is to not talk to your printer until you are finished designing. Professional and experienced designers know that you have to keep the printer in the loop very early, even before you even start designing. They can answers so many questions and help you make decisions. I remember a comment back when Jason was getting opinions on cover design…something to the effect of  ”Don’t let the printer tell you what you can and can’t do…you’re the client and artist! Don’t settle for anything below what your creativity demands.” Its a nice sentiment, I understand it completely, but it just doesn’t work that way unless you have unlimited time and money. A big part of design is getting a challenge whether its technical or conceptual and finding a way to get the best possible solution within those constraints. On a practical level, you have to weigh cost, time and quality equally with design.

We had an early idea to overlay some of the cover image as halftones line art onto the cloth cover. It would have been almost technically impossible to pull off…lining up two different images to print on two different surfaces. 3 different printing processes, registration nightmares. It’s the kind of thing where you need it to be 99% perfect for it to not look dumb and with printing tolerances and all that… it’s just too tall of an order, not to mention very expensive. The printer wasn’t sure how they could do it to their own internal quality control standards which means it would be very very expensive to pull off. It wasn’t integral enough to the cover design to pursue, so we killed it. Thats design.

Jason didn’t know what he wanted for the back cover, and i had suggested a nice quote from someone who’s name matters. That’s why they put quotes on books after all…It moves units! Jason knew Sam Keith was a fan…he was doing a pinup so I thought it would be a great thing to have a few words for the back cover. I was expecting a few lines. I got a paragraph. It was an amazing quote, but I had NO IDEA how to typset that in that limited rectangle.  I initially set it up in a nice little block on the back cover. It was OK…it was competent and professional, but it wasn’t great. I sent a .pdf to Jason and he basically said, “Yeah, it’s ok…can you do something better?” I get that statement occasionally and I absolutely hate it for the first few hours and love it days later. It pushes me to do my best work. The best things I’ve ever designed come from that sort of push, and the final solution for Sam’s quote came because Jason had the guts as a client to have an actual opinion.

I racked my brain for a few days…I just didn’t know what to do. I was looking through design magazines and saw some sort of kinetic type treatment. I don’t remember what it was and it had nothing to do with this final treatment, but for some reason it sparked a lightbulb. I ran to my computer, and came up with the first version of what became the final. The idea was to treat the quote almost like a poem, and typeset it in beats. Using the content, calling out important statements, receding supporting information i set this paragraph into something that could be skimmed or read all the way through and the idea still being there. Additionally once you get through all that formal design speak.…it also looks cool. I laid that on top of a screened back image of the lighthouse…in my mind a central character in the story, and all of a sudden you had front and back cover that worked together that told a story, created intrigue and compels a lookie-lou to fork over the cash and buy it!

Tune in next time to read all about the the meat and potatoes of a graphic novel…the interior!

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Christopher Kosek is a Graphic Designer who’s been working on his own graphic novel for way too long. Originally hailing from Washington DC, went to school in Southern California and wound up in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife and puppy. He loves sports, comics, design, and stuff in general. He’s always looking to meet new people and get involved with new and fun projects so feel free to say hi!

See more of his work at www.christopherkosek.com

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Designing reMIND – Part 1 – Where do you Start?

Designing reMIND – Part 2 – Collaboration

Designing reMIND – Part 3 – The Guts

Designing reMIND – Part 4 – Book Production

Designing reMIND – Part 5 – Proofing