Image’s Comic Book Tattoo, a 500-page beauty of a collection of comics inspired by Tori Amos songs, was nominated for Best Publication Design at this year’s Eisners (as well as Best Anthology), and designer Tom Muller took some time out to explain just how the design for the book took shape, complete with some images from the process.

Click to read on…

Back in January 2008 Rantz Hoseley (the editor of CBT) got in touch with me to ask if I was interested in designing Comic Book Tattoo. Rantz and I had bumped into each other on The Engine (the now defunct message board ran by Warren Ellis, where I also virtually met Ivan Brandon), and, after having seen the work I had done for Ivan (the design of 24SEVEN Vol 2) and my designs for Mam Tor’s Event Horizon and various projects for Ashley Wood, thought I’d be the ideal choice to design the book, seeing his vision was to do something very different from your “normal” graphic novel concept. Of course this was pretty much a no-brainer and I signed on for the job.

With plans to launch the book at SDCC, we needed to start work immediately, especially since we had an immovable deadline to go print with this end of April. While I started to sketch out logo ideas, Rantz, Tori, and the team at Image took care of logistics and gathering the creators and the lyrics/stories they would work on. Illustrator Jason Levesque was brought on board as the cover artist, while Jock created the endpaper art. Together, those two images would form the backbone of the book’s design and subsequent marketing campaign.

With Rantz acting as AD and sending designs back and forth between him, Tori and myself we arrived at a set of cover logos, incorporating Jason’s line-art, creating a unified identity that could be applied throughout, together with a color scheme of green hues based on the cover art and the endpaper piece by Jock.

Once the overall look was established (and the covers designed), I started on the design of the book, together with my wife Liz. By now it was already March, which meant we only had 4 weeks left to design and assemble roughly 480 pages. Pages we didn’t have yet because most creators were still working on their stories, so we started on designing a “skeleton” version of the book.

Because the book is all about music (or at least based on music lyrics) I wanted to keep a certain style to the design of the credits page, similar to liner notes/lyrics you’d get in a CD booklet — while adding the style elements that we’d created during the logo & cover design process (i.e. using our chosen fonts and colors).

The 15th of April was the cut-off time for the creators to deliver their files (we really had no extra time to spare), and sure enough, files came flooding in! Now it was “just” a matter of processing and pouring in all the art pages in the book. Along the way we realized we had been to generous in our allowances for the editorial pages. Since the whole project had already been budgeted and there was absolutely no room for expansion we all went back to the drawing board to fix this. This luckily proved to be fairly painless: we dramatically trimmed down the creator biography pages and rearranged the rest of the editorial pages to make it all work.

Right on schedule the book was finished. A FedEx delivery later the team at Image had a stack of DVDs with all the print ready files, in time to send them to the printers in China.

Now that the book was in production we looked at what else needed to be done: the marketing collateral. Convention season was looming and there was a need for a set of press material to support the book at retailer and consumer level: everything from in-store posters, free giveaways, stickers, temporary tattoos and bookmarks had to be produced. This proved to be the easiest part of the job because by now we’d developed the whole language of the book — so it was just a case of applying it to the various materials needed.

Finally, 550+ emails and 2 months later Comic Book Tattoo was launched in 3 editions at the San Diego Comic-Con with incredible success. Its continued success even warranted a special 4th edition that was released in November.

-Tom Muller

(An extended version of this can be found here and here, for those interested.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Art and Design, Graphic Novels, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.