Friday, August 6, 2010

Happy Trails To You!

Of all the books I've designed, this is one of my favorites, Happy Trails: A Pictorial Celebration of the Life and Times of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. For use in this blog, I had to scan the book jacket in two pieces and join them in photoshop. The scanner added some weird colorations which I negated, but the real cover looks a lot better, trust me!

B O O K   D E S I G N   A N D   P R O D U C T I O N — This book was a heck of a lot of work! Every page is photoshopped. While all of the photographs are from the Rogers family archives, virtually every other piece of art used was from my collection or was photographed for the book at my direction. I scanned everything from original records, to my grandmother's jewelry (for Dale's early glamour days), to ropes and pieces of velvet, to theater tickets, to toys and New Year's Eve noisemakers. Let's just say it pushed the envelope for 2004 in terms of file size and color work for the printer for a book at this relatively small press run and price point. Hey, that's the way I roll! I have the awards to back up my work, so I get to do pretty much whatever I want to on my books. I'd say that my own book will be very similar to this book in terms of each page being photoshopped and there being a collectible or something vintage on every page as well as all of the text. ( I won't reveal the title yet, but it's good!)

Amazon has a great feature for this book called "Look Inside" which allows you to see some of the interior pages as well as the cover. When you click the link to bring you to Amazon, then click on their cover and you'll be able to see some of the interior pages. You'll get a feel for what the book looks like for sure. I was going for a family album look, so every two-page spread has what looks like rings in the center with a sewn-in leather binding like a vintage photo album. There are some good customer reviews too.

The book has been reprinted several times and is still sold in the Roy Roger's Museum in Branson. Missouri as far as I know. Shortly after the book was published, their last remaining son sent the publicist two of their trademark Roy Rogers' watches, and the editor and I both received one. It was absolutely great to know that such a close family member valued what we had done enough to send a gift. I always like to please the author, I like it a lot when a book sells well, or needs to be reprinted, but to have someone personally connected with the subject matter love the book and let us know in that way that it touched them, well, it doesn't get any better for me.


Sent in appreciation for the book by Roy Rogers's son.

A Note About the Cover Design

The cover looks fairly simple but was a true photoshop project.
First I scanned one of my vintage family albums complete with the green yarn tying it together. I scanned a piece of old leather and superimposed it on the album cover in a square, covering over the original album's embossed title type. Then I took a couple of photos from the book, one of Dale Evans on her horse Buttermilk and one of Roy as a young singer. I overlayed them on the leather in a way that made them look like they were 'tooled' into the leather, like a western saddle I suppose. On top of that I created an old photo border, the one with the frilly edges, and I placed a black and white photo of the two of them together with Trigger. I then colorized that photo, which isn't as easy as it sounds, lol. I spent a lot of all-nighters working to get the various pieces to work together in a seamless fashion.

After the art was finished with, I had to design the cover type, which in this case consisted of a LOT of words for the title and subtitle. And Roy's and Dale's names. And the two author's names. It was a lot of text and I messed around with various incarnations for a long time. I think I created 15-20 versions using different fonts and sizes, having to make sure it was all readable, that it didn't cover the imagery too much, and that it was pleasing to look at, with no odd spacings or awkward ascenders/descenders. 

I'm VERY picky about my type. I customize the space between every letter and then every word—I'm not usually pleased with the way fonts are spaced automatically in paging programs, You'd be surprised at the number of graphic designers that just type the words and pick a font and never even think about the intercharacter spacing, or kerning as it's called. When I was an art director in charge of production designers, perfect typography was something I really insisted on, to the point of being nicknamed the King of Kerning and trust me they didn't call me that out of love, lol. I was a tyrant I guess, but when you're dealing with a book, everything has to be as perfect as possible or there is no reason to do it. In the end I think Happy Trails worked out quite well.

(By the way, the type controls on Blogspot are beyond rudimentary, they're maddening, lol. Sometimes it just doesn't publish the way I tell it to, or it publishes differently after an edit for no apparent reason!)

13 comments:

  1. I am so jealous of your book designs. That's a dream job! Who can I kill to get one like that?

    PS long live kerning! I was a typesetter in the 1980s. It's a lost art.

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  2. Casey, I think you will find this very interesting http://www.photographyserved.com/Gallery/Your-beautiful-eyes/428809

    It is from Stephen Fry's Tweet this morning.

    Off to read your blog then off to save the world, it's Friday after all.

    Later...

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  3. Wow, I find it so interesting when you tell the details you go to to produce a project. I hope it's not too late for me to learn to see better, too often I feel I glance at something and not really see it.

    I think your giving details like this help me to see the real picture, so thanks again.

    But I will say I give myself points, before reading your description, that I noticed Roy's face between the i and l and thought I bet that took some work.

    Isn't there a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans museum out in Apple Valley, CA? I think I drove past it once a long, long time ago.

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  4. hey Ish! Kill ME, Kill ME! : ) Actually I find I"m not designing much for the past few years. The publisher I freelance for has taken most design work in-house again, so I basically do production work for series of books I've designed in the past. The tide swings, though I know you know that. Sometimes it seems they do everything in-house, then they'll move to freelancers heavily, then they'll swing back. With my art now, and this blog, I'm happy to have the 80-100 hours a week I used to spend designing book to work on my art now instead.

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  5. Annie: I checked the book, and it seems there was a small Roy Rogers museum in Apple Valley in the late '60s in a converted bowling alley. Then from 1976-98 there was a larger museum in Southern California along Route 66 in Victorville. It says that he and Dale used to go to the museum most mornings to greet people and sign autographs. Can you imagine? Those are the 'stars' that never forgot how they go to where they were. So cool compared to the way so many famous people treat the public these days.

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  6. should have typed:
    Those are the 'stars' that never forgot how they GOT to where they were.

    i'm still working on my first cup of coffee, lol.

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  7. OMG! MY HERO, ROY ROGERS AND DALE EVANS.OUR LOCAL MOVIE HOUSE WAS CALLED HOLLYWOOD. THE THEATER IS STILL THERE. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? YES,IT DOES. I NEVER MISSED A ROY ROGERS' MOVIE. I HAD THE BIGGEST CRUSH ON HIM AS A GIRL. I WAS AROUND 12 OR 13 WHEN THAT HUGH CRUSH STARTED AND LOVED HIM UNTIL HE DIED.TO ME,HE WAS SO HANDSOME. HOW ABOUT GABBY HAYES. LOVED HIM ALSO. AFTER ROY DIED, DALE WENT INTO CHRISTIAN TV. I ALWAY WANTED TO BE DALE AT THAT TIME. ISN'T THAT SILLY? LOL, COULDN'T YOU JUST SEE ROY ROGERS BEING MY BOYFRIEND. HOW FUNNY. THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. ANNIE ARE WE HAVING FUN YET. NOW BACK TO REREAD YOUR POST. CASEY KEEP THEM COMING.I'M LEARNING THINGS THAT EXCITE MY LIFE EACH DAY.
    HI GUYS AND GALS.
    YEY, CASEY MADE A MISTAKE.
    GRANNY

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  8. Hi Granny! You would LOVE this book. You should keep checking that Amazon link. They sell used books, which are usually just from another bookseller, sometimes for less than a dollar! There are so many photos of Roy, Dale, their children, Gabby Hayes, Nellybelle the Jeep, lol. I'm really proud of every page!

    oh, I make mistakes all the time, lol. sometimes I have to edit my work 25 times, lol. I'll fix one mistake and make two more.

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  9. I loved Christian TV Dale. Didn't she have big lacquered Ann Miller hair?

    I think people forget that she was a big band singer when she was young, a real glamor girl.

    She had also married, had a child and divorced by 17 years old.

    She wasn't your average cowgirl.

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  10. you're right. the book goes into her early days too. the Big Band or Swing period looks to have been so much fun from the photos I've seen and the records I've heard,

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  11. I spent quite a bit of time on Amazon checking out this book and walked away really admiring all the detail work you put into every page. What a fun project! I can see you so immersed in your subject matter - not unlike a great actor or actress. And I definitely see why you treasure all of your collections. Like props in a play, they are there when you need them.

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  12. PX: thank you! it was fun to look through the Rogers' family photos and seeing what I have in my own stuff that I could use as spot art. and of course having produced that book in that way, has given me great ideas for 'the' book, lol. : )

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  13. Casey,

    We got our first TV in 1951 and the earliest show I have a clear memory of is the Roy and Dale show. I think part of it was Pat Brady's Jeep, Nellybell, and part of it was Roy himself.

    The contents of the Branson museum were recently sold for very big money at Christie's here in New York. I believe Trigger sold for more than 250K. I was interested to read that Trigger had just been a studio horse at Republic until Roy rode him in a movie and fell in love with him. I believe Buttermilk had a similar provenance.

    Paul, New York City

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