10 10 10!!!!

After a nice morning out shopping with mum, I did some more work on my Books Alive cover. The book's title is quite long - '10 Short Stories you Must Read This Year'. With a title like this, you really have to think a lot about hierarchy and the way the text is arranged on the page. If all of the text is treated equally, the importance of certain words is lost, and it doesn't have much of an impact on the viewer. If some of the text is too small or faint or hard to see, it becomes unbalanced and confusing.

The most important part of this title is '10', followed closely by 'short stories'. That's what this book is - a compilation of short stories, duh! Also, I placed emphasis on the word 'must'. Because it's a strong word and I felt I should treat it that way. And although it isn't capitolised, it's still stronger than the following words. You MUST read these stories. You must read these stories.

All that is left to do basically is the illustration of the owls, which I've decided will also be done in Photoshop. I really want to give this illo a real retro cartoon character look - solid, clean lines and sort of a silk-screen printed look.



This was a fun part - making the text pretty. For this design it was really imperitive that the title of the book was as much a piece of artwork as the rest of it. I used a cool font called 'Big Top' for the number 10, and then decorated it some more. They key to this is clever use of the Selection and Stroke tools:

• select the 10
• create a new layer
• modify > contract the selection by about 20 pixels or so
• use the Stroke tool, be sure the stroke is located INSIDE the selection
• repeat and experiment with various weights and colours
• and remember to create a new layer for each thing you do so you don't ruin anything you like!

I hope that makes sense. Here's a bit of a step-by-step series to give you an idea of what I did.