When I began working with my images I remembered the critiques from past projects and tried to avoid complicated, cluttered designs. I worked with as little color as possible and focused on the details of the design and text alone. I went through the Suitcase application and searched for fonts that I felt applied to my poem’s theme. I found a few including: Prestige Elite, Warning LXT Pi, Zebrawood, and Georgia. I was not satisfied with the few already on the hard drive so I went to www.dafont.com and downloaded extra fonts such as: Abusive Pencil, The King & Queen Font, Jellyka Castle Queen, Typo Garden Demo, A-Lolita Scorned, and Floral Two. The two fonts I used the most throughout my book are Jellyka Castle Queen and The King & Queen Font.
I made my final book piece to look like a large storybook. I used cardboard to give it a sturdy look. I contemplated painting the cardboard with either acrylics or spray paint but both resources were out of my reach. The size of the book correlates not only with my primary intent to make it immense, but also with to hold an old tape recorder that would play a music box sound when you turned to the last page. The music helps illustrate the last line: “If only you could hear the songs my bones sing.”
A lot of my images I brought directly into Illustrator and used live trace with varying thresholds and brush and stroke lengths and weights. I only used Photoshop to use quick selection and the gradient tool. I also used a variety of filters and the warp tool to blend images or give them a unique texture. All of the text was done in Illustrator using mostly the type tool or the type on a path tool. I printed the final images on the Xerox printers due to a surprising lack of printer points. I also used my dorm room printer to take care of the few images that have color. I tied the pages to the cardboard story book and manipulated the final page so that the coffin holding the girl was raised above the surface and gave the essence of a three-dimensional format.
