Brief • Book design, illustrations, typesetting and layout for the author's debut non-fiction title aimed at people who wish they could sing, perhaps as part of a choir, but feel they are not talented enough to do so.
Client • Richard Swan, Choir Director, London City Voices
Creative direction • I was given a wonderfully open brief for this book. The author's intention was to include illustrations which brought the non-fiction text to life and made the content more accessible for visually stimulated readers and learners.
Creative solution • On the first reading of Think You Can't Sing? Think Again! I realised that the essence of the book was in the style of writing; its friendly tone of voice and feeling of genuine intention to assist the reader in their personal journey. For this reason, I used the written content of the book to drive the illustration and the way the writing made me feel manifested in my drawing style.
Approaching the illustration as a visual scribe, I had my favourite graphite stick and piece of paper in front of me as I read the text from beginning to end. As I read, I drew what I was reading: the characters, the concepts and the theoretical music facts.
Initially, I created one page of collated illustrations as a frontispiece for each chapter. On showing the author, he was delighted and wanted the illustrations to feature throughout the text in order that each image was displayed next to it's textual counterpart to visually explain the content.
book design • book cover design • book layout • typesetting • font selection • colour palette • lettering • illustration
