Short Story Book Design
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
BFA Communication Design
Visual Translation, Spring 2019
This book is a double-sided short story for children which combines a Chinese folktale and an Inuit myth, both of which describe the origin of the sun as how the crow brought daylight to the world. A major focus of design features a start with simple, low-color structure before developing a more colorful sense of depth as the reader moves from page to page. The design acts as a visual parallel for the text as the narrative describes a world moving from darkness to one of bright light and vivid visuals.
The visuals from this book were also used to create a digital storytelling experience for the first half of the content. To read Ten Red Crows online, click here or use the following link:
http://www.kucdinteractive.com/mkester/storytelling/
The Process
After proof-reading the large mass of fictional text, one of the first steps was to create a grid structure for the text on each page in Adobe InDesign. After the type was set, sketches were drawn directly to a printed copy of the PDF to create complementary illustrations. The covers are excluded until the end.
Following a round of revisions in group critique, the illustrations were used for vector illustration within Adobe Illustrator.
Following what could be considered a phase of wire-frames, the next step determined an illustration style that referenced cut paper. An image was made through the physical process of creating and stacking shapes while others were made digitally within Adobe Illustrator to mimic the effect. The color and effect from this style was then carefully added to the pages along with revisions to spacing and color.
A final layer of depth was added to the pages through texture. For this book, large swatches of fabric were scanned in as 300 dpi tiff files and transformed in Adobe Photoshop. Different patterns were used to reflect different elements of the environment in the story, such as heat, light and temperature.
The last step before making a physical copy of the book was dedicated to making a set of covers for each side of the double-feature book, which went through their own round of revisions.
Finally, the digital Adobe InDesign file was transformed into a series of printed spreadsheets for the book's construction. The edges of each page were held together with double-sided tack and cut with a paper guillotine before the book was bound by hand using an x-acto knife, matte canvas paper, tack, some rubber cement and cover board.
