This Friday the artist Lajuana Lampkins is publishing The Collected Works of Prince Akbar aka Jus Rhymz, which she edited. I helped put the book together– design, content, printing, and so on, and I want to share specifics about how we got it done. Here’s how I made the cover.

Photoshop for image management

When printing images in real life, it’s important to have them prepared in high-resolution. I used Photoshop– the only specialty software in the project– to do this. There are lots of free alternatives, and I likely could have achieved my objectives with something like Google Photos, and most of the images went straight from light editing there into the book. But I already had Adobe Creative Suite for work, and I have a mental attachment to it from the 90s, so this is what I used.

Again, most of the images in the book are photographs of original material that I shot while I was with Lajuana– pictures of pictures. It was important to me that she retain possession of these images and it just was easier for me not to take them and then scan them or do some other processing.

This led to a bit lower image quality, but I was able to live with that– these kinds of tradeoffs come up all the time. With a strong content and a vision for the reader experience, it’s easy to get over these limitations. Publish uber alles.

Here’s Lajuana showing her painting for the front cover:

Here’s the photo I took of the piece:

I traced around the main image, eye-dropped the background, and used it for the main color for the cover and all collateral materials, and used the brush tool fill in the lettering where she wanted me to, on the crown and the sash. Then I added the title and credit line and it was done:

The back cover was more challenging, and that’s where my lack of skillz shows the most. Here was her original painting:

She wanted me to re-do all of the lettering in this painting and also called for the text at the to be a banner. I tried to do the banner, with the fluttering-style edges, but just couldn’t. Here’s what I ended up with:

A real designer would have done better, but I think the artist’s intent is there.

Bowker for ISBNs

The ISBN in the lower right back cover is a key component to the book. I buy ISBNs in groups of 10 for $295 from R.R. Bowker, “the exclusive U.S. agent for issuing International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), a universal method of identifying books in print.”

The cool thing about ISBNs is once you have one and assign it, the publishing industry never forgets you.

Google Slides for cover with spine

Once you’ve got the front and back covers done as high-resolution PDFs, and the inside contents and page count are complete, you have to combine both the front and the back in one file, with the properly sized spine in the middle.

Once you upload the interior, the printing company will let you know the exact dimensions with cutlines showing you where it’s safe to put the content (edges are not your friend).

Tomorrow: the scary, messy facts of ordering 500 IRL books from your laptop.