Wednesday, January 23, 2019

If You Could See Me Now, And 499 Other Novels




My accounts lady is currently logging all the ISBN numbers on every book I’ve illustrated, for a report I need to file in Feb. It’s  no small feat, as we’re getting close to 500 *insert surprised emoji face*


What’s been really nice as she goes through the shelves is rediscovering books I haven’t looked at for ages, and of course the majority pre-date Instagram. A few years ago I rebranded every Cecelia Ahern novel for Harpercollins UK - a task I was mega pleased about. I even went down to their office for a meeting about them  - coffee and biscuits and everything - which is fairly unusual now! 

At the time, this kind of organic hand-lettering was still fairly unusual, but was starting to make its way onto more covers here and in the US thanks to my own increasing forays into lettering-based ads, editorial work and book covers, and those of my colleagues Ruth Rowland, Stephen Raw, Jill Calder and Marion Deuchars. Now, you can download a free or cheap font version of something similar to all of these - more on that later - but these were created as individual pieces of hand-inked lettering integrated with the little illustrations for each cover. Although you'd have to tear my Apple Pencil from my cold dead hands, I still prefer to create my type-based work in ink, or at least originate it there.

It’s really nice to see these again; and I don't think I blogged them at the time. They’ve been re-designed since and she’s written plenty more books, but I reckon these have stood the test of time!

This was from the brief, showing what the Harper art team had identified about my work which led them to me for this job:



MANY versions were tried out for each cover:



















No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails