Possible Chamber Book Cover

[Swampy]

My current "big" project is putting together a 72 page full color Membership Directory and Visitor's Guide for our local Chamber of Commerce. I've been contemplating the front cover, but it's getting difficult. We've used orange groves, caladiums, patriotic theme and sunset shots in the past, but they have been dark orange and red sunsets and I thought this shot would be a little softer and more pleasing.

We have 27 fresh water lakes in our area and one of our tag line is "Florida's Lake Country" so a lake shot is appropriate and tourists expect to see palms in Florida.

In composing this shot, I had to take into consideration laying text over portions of the picture. The text would be...

Lake Placid, Florida (on one or two lines)
Chamber of Commerce - Membership Directory (two lines)

So here's your challenge... Layout the cover of the book... Let us know what font(s) you have used and any special effects or styles you've applied.

I've completed the cover, but would love to see how you would approach it.

[bart_hickman]

It's such a great photo, I didn't want to do much. Top font is called lithos pro regular--bold. Bottom font is called Adobe caslon pro bold. It's set on a dark violet gradient. I pumped up the saturation a little bit on the photo.

Bart

[Kraellin]

hi dee dee,

had to have a go at this.

edwardian script II.
masked upper half, contrast, darken.
lower half, fast fix for more blue, more sat, more contrast, darken.
cropped to roughly the same aspect ratio. (too much blank sky at the top)
added border on blank raster.

text of 'chamber of commerce' and 'lake placid, florida' might be reversed depending on client's wants. just change the point size if so. point sizes on current were 36, 26, and 20.

the font may not come through right here with the compression, but it looks nice on my machine

craig

edit: one other thought occurs to me here. you could add a small sailboat on the water somewhere, if desired.

[Swampy]

Oooohh Bart, I like the additional gradient! It makes a good backdrop for the text.

Craig, I do like your choice of font. It has a lot of class and style. I forgot to mention that the photo I posted includes bleeds on four sides, so your main line would have to be reduced in size a tad. Don't know if I like the blue'er and darker water since it seems to provide less contrast for the silhouetted palms to pop off of. ???

[Kraellin]

dee dee,

not quite sure what 'bleeds' are, but i get that you need some space. you gotta mention these things at the onset, not when i'm done. actually, as the 'contractor', i shld take responsibility and find these sorts of things out before the job begins. i've told others, 'ALWAYS find out what the client wants and needs. dont rely on them to tell you!'. so, there's a good lesson for those learning to be R&R'ers.

re the dark, yes, i have a tendency to do that on things like sunsets. there's a thread in the critique forum that ken rogers started where i've darkened the thing up also. so again, find out what's needed and wanted

i know, you opened this up as a 'do one of your own' and are just telling me why you wouldnt have done some things. that's fine.

so, what did you come up with?

craig

[Swampy]

Hi, Craig

Sorry about not mentioning bleeds... when you make the graphic a little larger than the finished product (usually by 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch). In printing, this allows for "creep" and "trimming".

CREEP... Imagin folding 36 sheets of paper (for a 72 page book) in half. It is so thick that the outer edge of the pages begin to recede back toward the spine of the book more and more as the book gets thicker. In the bindry department, the book will be stapled and then the outer edges TRIMMED so that the edges are flush and neat. (The left side of the graphic must also bleed also so that it will "wrap" to the staple area of the spine.) So bleeds allow for the eventual trimming.

Re "the dark". I like what you've done, but prehaps something you didn't know about 4 color process printing... Things tend to print slightly darker than they appear on screen due to what is called "dot gain" (how the ink gets absorbed and distributed on the paper). This project will be printed on gloss stock so not as much of a problem there, but imagin if it were printed on matte paper or vellum.. arrrgh it could spread like ink on a blotter.

Here's where I'm at with this project. As I mentioned, the Chamber wanted a "softer" less saturated look since they've done so many deep red/orange sunset covers in the past so I have not made many color adjustments to the photo except to take the palms to almost black and obtain a very silhouetted look for them, and desaturate the out of gamut areas around the sun glow.

The mainline font, Bellevue, is very traditional for our Chamber, they've used it for years on many of their promotional pieces. The "membership" lines are in ITC Stone Sans (I find it stylish, but easy on the eyes when used with a swashy script font).

The Mainline text color is still up for debate. The tropical pink with black for the outline is kind of "retro" (remember poodle skirts in pink and black?), but tends to play off the black palms and pink glow of the sunset.

BTW.. I shot this in RAW format and was very pleased with the fact that there was no artifacting in the file! My son gave me a 3 gig memory card for my camera and it allows me to take over 300 RAW files on the card! I took about 30 shots during this session and the 222mb download seemed to take forever... LOL

[Kraellin]

ah, bleeds and creeps. k. makes perfect sense. and now that you mention it again, i do remember a discussion on retouch about 'dot gain'. so, ok on that one also. you also mention gamut and that's one thing i find psp and even elements 4 lacking in. neither of these programs have any way of checking out of range gamut, which i find (especially elements) quite odd. i print a fair number of images on my home printer and i'm always having to compensate for mis-printing. i even started a couple threads in the software forum about trying to correct for gamut in both these programs, but no one seemed to have much of an idea. i cant work in cmyk. neither program has the ability. and i'd just like a way to see on the monitor what i'm going to ACTUALLY get on the printer. it would save me a lot of time and headaches. i suppose the best way would be to just go buy photoshop, but i thought i was going to get some of this in elements, which was why i bought it (well, i also bought it as a translation tool, to try and understand explanations here on retouch when folks talk about 'transform' and so on).

i have a couple suggestions for you on your image. stretch the 'lake placid' text horizontally. it's also not quite centered (though that may be because of what you said about bleeding and creeping, so ok if that's the case).

and two, add a touch more blue to the water. it doesnt have to be dark blue; just a bit more blue. a selection of the bottom half with the water, and a blank raster layer with some robin's egg blue at a medium opacity might do it. i do get the gray and pink theme here, so the blue might not work for that and if so, why ok.

i'm also not real crazy about the font types here, but i also know chambers of commerce tend to be a bit stodgy, business traditional, conservative, so, whatever the client wants

and thank you for showing me

craig

[Ken Fournelle]

Thanks for the fun exercise!

[Swampy]

Craig...

I thought about stretching the "Lake Placid" across the page, but there are already two very strong visual horizontal lines in the cloud and horizon tree line. It just didn't look right to me. Also, since we tend to read top left to bottom right setting it off to the left seemed to direct the eye from there down the diagonal of the palms, pausing at the sun glow then on to the Membership line.

I've added a hint of blue to the water with a masked gradient, but our lakes around here tend to be very gray even in bright sunlight. This does tend to darken the sun's reflection, but I could work on that.

>but i also know chambers of commerce tend to be a bit stodgy, business traditional, conservative, so, whatever the client wants

Especially when THEY don't know what they want and the whole thing has to go before the Publishing Committee! Six people all with their individual input on how it should look!! It drives me absolutly UP A WALL.

Very Nice, KEN!! Love the way you have cast peach tones into the water! Your vibrant sky really draws attention, but it wouldn't print that saturated and intense. It would make a great slide show/Power Point presentation graphic though! I took your version into P'shop and the entire sky is out of gamut (lime green in my second image.)

[Ken Fournelle]

I didn't ckeck the gamut---you're right of course. But what if you had a client that liked those colors, how would your handle that in CMYK? Can you at all?

k

[Swampy]

Good question....

I generally take a Pantone Spot to Process color book in and show them how all the colors shift (including theirs) during the CMYK print process.

I run into this with corporates all the time. They insist their logo color is PMS XXX and that the local printer can match it perfectly. I patiently try to explain that the printer has the option of pulling a can of PMS XXX blue ink off the shelf and printing that for their letterhead, business cards etc. because the print process is offset not process color. I show them that the process printer has four colors of ink to print with C,M,Y and K and must create their PMS color using these colors. I can usually find some process printed piece around their office and show them how their Pantone prints as process even on a piece done by the "home office". I do mention that we could add a spot color (making the run a 5 color job) which would cost more. Money considerations usualy out weigh picky buyer's demands when they discover that the home office accepted the color shift in the printing of their piece. :-)

[Mike]

Smart Axx question.....

If its called Lake Placid, how come there are waves on the lake?

Wouldn't it have been better to shot the lake when it was still?????

[Swampy]

Hehehe, Mike

Can't help the wind that evening.. LOL

[bart_hickman]

Haha. Funny question. Okay, here's a placid lake in Lake Placid. I used the texture from the old lake as a weak displacement map for the new lake to give it a small amount of ripple.

Bart

[makeovermagic]

i hope you don't mind, but i thought i'd try this.