Portuguese Style of Knitting—Book

Someday the sun is going to shine down on me
in some faraway place.
[Mahalia Jackson]

Andrea Wong introduced her new knitting book, Portuguese Style of Knitting, at the TNNA convention in Columbus, Ohio in June of 2010. She and I worked together on the layout and design of the book for a year. What a delightful experience. I felt like I’d won a chance to travel to faraway places with strange sounding names even though I stayed in my own studio and she traveled.

I laid out this 96-page book in Adobe InDesign, and used Adobe Acrobat to distribute copies for proofing. Then the book was printed in full color and perfect bound by Friesens Corporation in Altona, Manitoba, Canada.

2011 Willowgreen Products

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson]

2010 was a busy year for production at Willowgreen. The following briefly describes a selection of our work:

Willowgreen’s 1-Minute Inspirations
What can you communicate in 60 seconds that matters? That inspires a little? That appeals to the eye and the ear? That touches the heart and the soul? These are the questions that Jim Miller attempts to answer on Willowgreen’s 1-Minute Inspirations every week. A new 1-Minute Inspiration debuts each Wednesday morning. To browse this blog, select this LINK

The Gift of Healing Presence: The Book
Our newest book, The Gift of healing Presence: Encouraging Thoughts for Busy Caregivers, focuses on ten basic thoughts that simplify the process of being a healing presence. Only 32 pages long, incorporating one-page chapters and highlighting Jim Miller’s full color photography, this book gives caregivers the background and encouragement they need to be a healing presence for those in their care.

The Gift of Healing Presence: The Audiovisual
In Willowgreen’s newest audiovisual on the subject of healing presence, you can hear Jim Miller’s voice while watching his carefully orchestrated images illustrate the words of his most recent book. Photography from nature picks up on the nuances of the message, inviting the viewer to make personal associations. The eleven-part DVD can be viewed in its entirety or a section at a time. It is ideal for group meetings and workshops.

Un Ser Amado Ha Fallecido
El Duelo Como Camino Hacia Su Restablecimiento
The wisdom and encouragement of Willowgreen’s 32 page book, One You Love Has Died, is newly available in Spanish. Now you can share this popular book with those for whom Spanish is their preferred language.

eBooks
We’ve moved quickly to make 15 of our Willowgreen titles available in electronic format for use on various e-readers. Now you can carry our books with you with ease and read them wherever you go. All of our eBooks can be purchased and downloaded directly from our website. They will also be available through other major distributors.

Audiobooks
To keep our work as accessible as possible, we’re adding this new line of products that can be downloaded almost anywhere, any time. Jim Miller has narrated several of our more popular books, with plans to complete more in the coming months. You can access them directly from our website.

Peace UCC Website

The way we communicate with others and with ourselves
ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
[Anthony Robbins]

The new site that I designed and produced for Peace United Church of Christ serves to communicate both the church’s activities and those of a school that is attached to the church. The differences between the church and school parts of the site are subtle and seamless but fairly separate. This site consists of 75 server-side pages with the menus coded in include files. Each page is designed to fit in a browser window with minimal scrolling.

Willowgreen Publishing Catalog

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
[John Muir]

The 2005 and 2006 Willowgreen Publishing catalogs (above, left) were laid out in QuarkXpress. I used Adobe InDesign for the 2007 and 2008 layouts (above, right). The 2009 catalog (right) has recently shipped.

Every August, I look forward to this job. The owner of Willowgreen, Jim Miller, is a photographer so I have an endless supply of inspiring photographs from which to choose—a delight for a publication designer.

The Caregiver’s Book

The healthiest way to care for another is to care for yourself.
[James E. Miller]

The Caregiver’s Book, released September, 2008 by Willowgreen Publishing, is a second edition. As such, I tried to capture colors and design elements from the first edition so that the two printings would appear related. I changed the typography, overall size and images to be in keeping with other books recently published by Willowgreen. Jim Miller’s photography in this book is stunning.

This Time of Caregiving

Dreams are illustrations
from the book your soul is writing about you.
[Marsha Norman]

This Time of Caregiving is a book published by Willowgreen, Inc. in 2007. It has four-color printing on the coated cover, and one color printing (black) on the uncoated inside. This kept the unit cost low enough that the retail price could be kept under $5.00.

The author, James E. Miller, is also known for his nature photography and took the photo for the book cover. Since the uncoated paper on the inside pages would not present his photographs in the most effective manner, he decided to use a series of pencil illustrations instead. I used his photographs as resources when I rendered the drawings but altered them to fit the space where they were to be used.

Jim Miller produced a CD version (audio) and a DVD version (video) of this book in 2008. Since these are companion publications, I used the same color scheme and image for the packaging as I used for the book cover design. These products may be purchased at the Willowgreen website.

Kitchen Table Stories

As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices:
take it or leave it.
[Buddy Hackett]

This anthology of short stories and recipes is being assembled by The Story Circle Network. The book is 8.5x 8.5 inches and will be spiral bound.

The cover illustration started with the pencil drawing (right). The drawing was scanned and placed on a top layer in Adobe Photoshop with “multiply” applied to the layer. The color was then applied to layers below the drawing layer from front to back. For example, the apple tint is on the layer just below the drawing and the wall tint is on the first (bottom) layer. A flattened version of the tinted drawing was then positioned on the cover background in another Photoshop file. All of this was assembled in Adobe InDesign for the final CMYK printer file. Since the inside pages are one-color printing, a grayscale version of the drawing was also saved to use on the inside title page.

Monkeying Around

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.
[Scott Adams]

This is a carbon-dust rendering — a method used to give a continuous-tone, photographic effect to a drawing. The shaded areas are built up with a brush dipped into carbon dust.

I rendered this monkey skull drawing at a Smithsonian scientific illustration workshop in Highlands, NC. I can do better with models that hold still. I admire the skill of some artists who can render a drawing on the fly, but I’m too slow for that. I keep this drawing to remind myself of that delightful week of constant learning.

Cherokee Treasures

Wood is a living thing.
You may not have to rest when you are carving, but it needs to.
[Goingback Chiltoski — Cherokee Woodcarver]

Here’s an illustration I did that looks like pen and ink but was produced in a darkroom. Talk about old technology. I scratched this image with a hat pin into the emulsion of a piece of 4 x 5 sheet film then made contact prints. The subject matter is three Eastern Band Cherokee objects—one feather, a river reed mat and a wood carving,

Hallmarks, Logos, Icons etc.

[A logo] should look just as good in
15-foot letters on top of company headquarters
as it does one sixteenth of an inch tall on company stationery.
[Steven Gilliatt]

No matter what you call it, the mark by which a business or organization is identified requires careful design considerations. Once the design process is past the angst of what best represents the organization, my biggest concern is, how might it be used? A Time to Knit, LLC is a publishing company. Its hallmark needs to fit on book spines, business cards, and stationary. It needs to render just as well in black and white as it does in color.

This brings me to my first guiding principal—a logo usually needs to look as good in one color at a low resolution as it does in more sophisticated applications.

Unlike the logo above, the mark at the right does not render well at a low resolution. In this instance, that is okay. The lighthouse mark was designed to be used only to identify a series of publications that will be produced in high resolution printing—a collection of garment designs called, Great Lakes Chill Chasers.

A second guiding principle asks the question, “Will the mark be put to a specific and limited use or will it be used for an extended period of time across many media applications?”

The logo at the left is the most detailed one I’ve designed—usually simple line art is the ideal choice. This was done with a purpose. The city of Dayton has a logo that features a Wright Flier circling a globe. This guild is closely identified with its geographic location so the Wright Flier is used and the globe has been translated into a ball of knitting yarn.

Even though this is complex for a logo, it has been successfully reproduced using silk screening and embroidery—two uses best rendered with a simple design.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Shepherd’s Moon mark at the right was designed for website use only. Although the original art is high enough resolution to be printed commercially, it would lose a lot of its impact if rendered in gray-scale.

Willowgreen Online

Communication is depositing a part of yourself in another person.
[Author Unknown]

Willowgreen Publishing’s online presence includes a large website, two photoblogs, and an email newsletter/blog. Unlike the businesses featured in the September 15th post, the Willowgreen sites are not designed to be identical. They do, however, share similar structures and Jim Miller’s nature photography. The main website includes over 1,000 pages and a shopping cart interface. Although it offers hundreds of pages of advice and inspiration at no charge, its main purpose is to sell Willowgreen Publishing products.

The Contemplative Photographer is a non-commercial photoblog that Jim Miller maintains to share his interest in photography. Its basic design is subtle so that it doesn’t detract from the featured photographs.

The Thoughtful Caregiver is also a non-commercial photoblog in that it offers support and inspiration to family caregivers free of charge. One of the most popular features of this blog is the free monitor wallpaper offered with each blog post.

InSight is both an email newsletter and a blog. The email introduces the topics and the blog publishes the full version of the stories. The email is produced and sent through Constant Contact at web.com. That technology allows us to make the newsletter and the blog look almost alike.

Apples and Oranges

Create your own visual style…
let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
[Orson Welles]

I love challenges. One of my favorites is adapting a client’s visual style to a variety of media and different technologies. For example, my Colwell Colour client wanted to coordinate the look of the corporate website (above, left) with their publications and graphic standards. We used fairly standard technology to achieve that look. Their color stylist who travels the world wanted a blog where she could discuss current trends. We were able to adapt the corporate look to her blog by customizing a WordPress template. Different technologies—same visual style.

Life coach, Cheryl Gardiner, wanted her site (above, right) to coordinate with her business card. She also wanted to be able to update it herself without knowing HTML so I adapted a template using ImageCafe at web.com. Since their blog service is a journal format and doesn’t allow comments, I restyled a WordPress blog template to match her site.

On the other hand, I designed and produced the Trilobite Media website with its Flash movie introduction before I created their business cards. I started with a scan of their logo from a piece of their stationary and developed the design in Adobe Illustrator to avoid image resolution problems when we sent the job to print.