Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Special Effects


Ever wonder how does the designer tell the printer what effect he or she wants on a jacket?
Well I'll tell ya. Here is an example of the print out made for Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules by Jeff Kinney.
Early on in designing the first book we had decided that we wanted it to look like a journal. Okay but how do you get it to feel like one? I wanted the jacket to have a found object feel. As If Greg Heffley had drawn and pasted the objects on to the cover himself. To enhance this idea we used a Spot UV coating on the tape to give it a tape like feel in contrast to the matte surface of the cover. Over all the effects are fairly common but used in a way that enhances the concept of the book rather than just adding an aesthetic appeal. I think we managed both in this case.

Here in this example you can see how I marked the print out up to tell the printer exactly what I wanted.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thats all you have to do?! Write on it? Wow. In the greeting card industry we have to call out that kind of thing as a spot color on a different layer or channel within the file. And when one card has glitter and a tip on and some embossing - it begins to get time consuming to set up the file. You're lucky!
- Christy
Ilustrator/Designer at International Greetings

Chad W. Beckerman said...

Well you have to do more than that. Our Production dept takes it from there. Talking with the printers about the best ways to produce the books. I just give them my vision for what the book should look like. They do the leg work need for that to happen.