How a Book is Made: The Designer

Meet Nigel Jordan, graphic designer.

Nigel designed all the inside pages for the Read On books, include Lone Wolf.
Nigel is going to tell you about how he put the words and pictures together in the pages of this dark and thrilling tale.

Nigel says:

The design of a new book starts with the ‘design brief’ from the publisher. This gives me the basic information I need:
•  Page size
• Whether the book is colour or black and white
• The number and style of illustrations or photos
• The age of the intended reader and
• The suggestions and requirements of the publisher.

In the case of Lone Wolf, making the pages visually interesting wasn’t too difficult.
With Matt Timson’s stunning illustrations providing the main imagery, I had to ensure that the other graphic elements on the page, such as chapter headings and pages numbers, enhanced the look rather than detracted from it.

Nigel’s work station in his home studio, where he worked on Lone Wolf 

Where to start. A read-through of the author’s manuscript showed werewolves figured strongly.
A red and black colour scheme along with the illustration style suggested a ‘dark feel’ to the book.

Claws, teeth, scary eyes and blood, lots of blood – those were my first thoughts. I tried wolf eyes for the chapter headings and a single claw mark for the page numbers. Too fussy. The design evolved through a number stages and in the end both the eyes and the claw marks were replaced with blood spatters.

The author writes the story but sometimes spelling or grammatical mistakes can be left in. My first layout or ‘proof’ doesn’t include the illustrations or the graphics, just the words, so these can be checked.

This is then ‘marked up’ by the proof reader and I make their changes. In this way the text is refined so that it is the best it can be. After each set of changes I supply another and slowly the pages start to look more like they will when printed.

As well as looking at the appearance of the page, I also have to make sure that the text the reader is reading is a good size, using a clear and appropriate style of ‘font’*. There are a number of things which make a page easy to read and these include how many words are on each line and how far apart those lines are.

*There are many thousands of different fonts to choose from. 

These can make text look very different. Compare the chapter headings in Lone Wolf to the main paragraphs. You wouldn’t want all the words on the page to look like the chapter heading – that would be very difficult to read.

When everyone is satisfied with the look and quality of the text, I produce a PDF (Portable Document Format) file, which is sent to the printer to be turned into the finished book.

– Nigel Jordan

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How a Book is Made - The Editor

Meet Cathy Martin, editor.

Cathy is the Commissioning Editor for all the ‘Read On’ books including, of course, Lone Wolf.  This means she came up with ideas for the books and found authors and illustrators to make those ideas a reality!

Cathy is going to tell you about the many parts of the process for putting together Lone Wolf.

Cathy says …

My role as editor of ‘Read On’ involved coming up with and researching the idea of the whole series, and then working with a team of creative people to make it happen.
I first talked to teenagers in different schools about the kind of books they enjoyed reading. Of course, horror was a popular choice. One boy told me he would like to read a story where a bloody heart was ripped from someone’s body!

We were delighted that Alan Gibbons and his son Robbie Gibbons were able to write several stories for us. Here is the email Alan sent me with their first ideas:

The werewolf story sounded like it was just what we were looking for. Robbie wrote a short summary of the story and then the full manuscript of Lone Wolf arrived.

The editing process for Lone Wolf was very straightforward, as the first draft of the story was so strong.  There were just a few corrections to make.

A sample page from the real manuscript

The biggest decision was what to show in the illustrations.

In horror stories, as in horror films, the most scary moments are not when you see something horrible but when it is heard or suggested.

For most of the book we decided to focus on Danny’s thoughts and feelings as a boy, and to let readers imagine the werewolf for themselves. However, Matt Timson, our amazing illustrator, didn’t agree! He thought readers would definitely want to see the transformation on the page.

So, thanks to him, we have this image of Danny turning into a wolf on page 42.

Our designer Nigel laid out the book, we did some final checks and edits to make sure the text was just right, Paul finalised the cover, and then the files were sent to the printer.

The cover

Final pages from the book

Ten weeks later, Lone Wolf was here!

As an editor, nothing beats the thrill of holding a finished book in your hands. It was great to see those blood splashes and claw marks in the design, and the wonderful artwork to draw readers into Robbie and Alan’s story.  We may not have had a bloody heart but we certainly had an exciting and gruesome book ready to share.

– Cathy Martin

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How a Book is Made - The Illustrator

Meet Matt Timson, illustrator.

Matt drew all the pictures on the cover and inside the exciting Lone Wolf book.
Matt is going to tell you about how he brought this dark and frightening tale to life with images.

Matt says ...

I was particularly excited about this project because I knew I’d be working on a book that I would’ve wanted to read when I’d been at school.

One of the things that I often disliked when I was a teenager was reading an illustrated story that had bad or boring art in it. The story itself is obviously the most important part of any book, but if you’re going to take the time and effort to include illustrations, why not make them the best illustrations that you can?

When I first started working as an illustrator, I worked on paper, with pencils, markers and paints. These days I work digitally, with several different drawing programs, and I use a Cintiq.

A Cintiq is a pressure sensitive screen that I draw straight onto with a special pen, in the same way that you would draw on paper.  If I make a mistake, I can just hit ‘undo’ and draw my line again. This means that I can experiment more and don’t have to wait for paint to dry.

The ‘illustration brief’ I got from the publisher for Lone Wolf  included a copy of the story for me to read, along with notes on the 14 full-page illustrations that needed drawing.
From this I produced something called ‘thumbnails’, which are tiny, rough sketches of what I think the publisher is after.  These were my initial 14 thumbnails.

These go off to the publisher so that they can discuss what they think works and what doesn’t.
These are the second round of thumbnails.

As you can see, there have been a few changes, but nothing too drastic. I was pleased that the publisher decided to include a picture of the boy changing into the wolf, as I think that’s what everybody really wants to see in a book about werewolves!
This was my initial line art, drawn in Manga Studio.

I sent this one back to the publisher and there was some discussion about whether or not he should look more human.
I was keen to leave it as it was – I think it’s more exciting to look at and definitely more fun to draw. fortunately, the publisher agreed!
Here, I’ve softened all the line art in Painter and Photoshop.

Back in Painter, I added grey tones to make the figure look more solid.

Back to Photoshop – this time I added more tone, texture and highlights, a layer at a time. By this stage, I was probably using around 10–12 layers! That way, if I made a major mistake, or just want to experiment with different ideas, I didn’t lose the work that I was already happy with and I could just delete the layer that I was working on.

This is the point where I would normally add colour as well, but the only real colour in this picture was around the eyes, so that’s all that’s on the colour layer.

The last thing I did for this piece was to add a slight colour tint in Photoshop, which made the whole thing a bit less grey.
Here is the final product, and how it looked in the book pages!

- Matt Timson
www.matttimson.com

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