Lessons

Lesson Info

show & tell (part 2)

I think the best way to start this is to say hi, I'm James Victoria. Let's talk about me. Look, look, look what I made. Exactly. Exactly. I remember those. I remember, I remember like, hey, I'm gonna pretend like I'm playing guitar and my sister's gonna pretend like they're singing, let's put on a show. Um But oddly enough, that's what I do for a living. When I was a kid. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a daredevil. I wanted to be uh a stand up comedian. Um And I wanted to be a writer. I didn't wanna be a, an artist. I wanna be a writer. Um And to a certain degree I've done, I'm, I'm kind of all of those things which is weird and cool. Um um And I'm still constantly saying, hey, look at me, look what I can do, right? I got a text today during class. Um and it was uh my friend Miranda who is a uh publisher, publisher. She, she, she runs the uh publishing company that I, I was gonna say I work for, I don't work for shit I work for me. Um But we, we wo...

rk together. Um And the way that relationship started is a bunch of years ago, I spoke at the do lectures in Wales and we got along swimmingly. Then they came to me and they said, hey, James, we're gonna start a publishing arm, a publishing company. And basically people who spoke at the lecture who have something to say. They said, we think we have a, you have a book in you and we're gonna help you get it out into the world. So they ha they just basically write a contract with people who spoke there, spoken there and they give them a book opportunity and they are the publisher, right? So they said we want you to design all the covers and it's gonna be a series. So you want a series look. And I said, awesome, I will give you the series look and I will design all the covers and they said great. Here's our budget and it was teeny and I was like, it wasn't even what, what I would do for one cover, you know, and basically they wanted the series look and they wanted the first four books. And I said, ouch, and I said, OK, here's how it goes for that money. I will design the series look and I will design all of your covers. But here's the deal you get. No say whatsoever I design it, you print it exactly. Uh they said that makes us nervous. And when the first four books came out, when the first four books were published, they, they, they wrote on their blog that they said James Victoria asked us to trust him and we're glad we did. Right. Um In that deal that we have that they give me a title, I give them a cover. It gets published. That makes them nervous. It makes me me nervous constantly because I've now set a high bar for myself. I can't call it in. You know, it sounds funny. I can call it in for five grand. I can't call it in for free. You know what I mean? Plus it's a relationship. I mean, that's what I, I don't want clients. I want comrades. I want relationships. I want where we grow together, right? I always knew like I always knew I'd get a call from a magazine or somebody or somebody and I wanted, I always wanted to be like, you know, you don't love me. We're gonna do this once we're gonna have this one date and then I'm never gonna hear from you again and I'm, I'm just gonna kinda kinda say it up front right now. OK? Because I'm not gonna do that. I'm just not gonna do that right? And then I'll go oh Wait, wait, how much? Oh OK. Let me get Mr Victoria on the line for you, right? Is that joke? Um So I got a call today or a text today from the new books from Miranda, my, my comrade and she said, um got a new cover and I'm like, awesome. Um So my deal with the do books is, or my personal deal with, with, with myself with the do books is I set up a format with them. That's just basically really big type as big as possible and as big as possible. Typographically depends on how many words there are per on the page, right? If the cover is it, it, it's like awesome. It's just like boom, two big letters. But if it's it the story of a malevolent clown who goes bad and steals kids and you know what I mean? Like then all of a sudden all the type just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So there's basically that's the format and then my deal with after that was then and there's, then there's an image and it goes right smack in the middle. Like I don't care where I don't care. But this relationship of typography and image, I don't care. Someday, I wanna get a client who's going to ask me to design like a museum catalog or a picture book, right? A photo, photographic book with texts. And what I would do is I would take all the photographs and I would, I would choose the size of book and design all the photographs on the pages and the, you know, the page number and the page size of design that I give somebody else the typography and say, here's the size of the book, here's the page count, here's all the text, you design the text and then the text and the images only meet at the printer. I think that would be brilliant. I think that would be dangerous. But I think that's brilliant. I wouldn't be able to let go of that control. I would be like, no, somebody's ruining the text. You know, I know. I know he's ruining my image. I know. Exactly. Yeah. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. No, you got peanut butter in my chocolate, right? No control control. No. Let go surrender. It's so much more fun. Can you control when you're surfing? Oh I couldn't ask you, you gotta go with the wave. No, you gotta surrender baby. Like I ride. I like I love motor motocross. Can you control on a dirt bike? No, you're gonna get tired like in 30 seconds you gotta, you, you're just standing on it and it's going like this underneath you, right? You gotta let it go. That's what I said earlier. Ride that horse and let go of the reins. Trust it. So the new book I got today um oh here. So there's the typography and then there's the image, right? And they just meet some way they work or they don't and I'm lying. OK? That makes me feel better. I do I do. I have to noodle a little bit because, you know, so that perfection. My book, I had some crazy covers. I'm like, this is my book. It's about lack of perfection. It's about la, lack of control. I had one that just looked like a romance novel. Right. It had like the two people kissing on a shore and great. I had everything upside down. I had the type topography so big that the spine was on the back. And I was, I had some really crazy, wonderful stuff. But at the end of this day, you know what I wanted to sell books. So you have to kind of understand that we do live in this commercial marketplace and I do work in there, right? But as far as the images themselves, my idea is to my test, personal test is to um do the cliche without doing the cliche. So that's why I wanted to show these today. So how do you do the cliche without doing the cliche? And there are some that it's just impossible. It really was. But there are some, let me see is this is not all of them, this is some of them. OK. There are some in here that some in here that are just do it perfectly and there are some that aren't in here that do it perfectly, but we can go through this. Um So one of the two of the, two of the first covers were these two, it was due birth. And again, you can see the the typography is just big flush left. Um Williams Cas William Kong or Klo Williams. I don't even know what it's called. I don't know, it's, it's a type face. Go look it up. I don't know um do birth. And to me this is kind of like my version of mother and child, right? I don't know. To me it said birth somehow, don't ask me to explain it, right? Like um um I was going off of the um American modern artist um Henry Moore. I don't know if you know Henry Moore's work, but he did a lot of work with mother and child and the mother was this big huge image and the child was basically this, this this hole that was cut in her, right? So it was this idea of positive and negatives. And uh um I went off of that and chose these two images. Um The next one was do story and it says um how to tell your story. So the world listens. So for me, I had this idea of, I love voice balloons. Um So I drew this voice balloon and then put this little uh fire in it, meaning meaning you've got something to say or um campfires are important to me because that's the birth of communication and birth of community. And that's where the stories are told and the myths started, right. Um, and the author got this, saw this cover and got in touch with me and said, James, I love the tongue. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She saw a tongue and a voice balloon which is like, yeah, whatever they call flames, tongues though too. Oh, a flame of flame. Tongue of fire. Yeah. Um, and by the way, the authors have no say they can't tell me they like it or they don't like it. So you're like, oh grumble, grumble. So this is do wild baking. So this is a guy who, and I know him, he's a good guy. He's a tremendous guy and, and fewer words here. So the typography grows and the author's name grows and if obviously, if the author has a long name, they, there's nothing I can do about it. It has to get smaller, right? You don't really wanna break authors names. Um But he does all of his cooking outdoors uh over an open fire. I mean, like restaurant quality food over a fire and that's what this is all about. So I was like, oh, I just, you know, I wanna draw the crudest, most rudimentary campfire that I can. So I just literally, it's crayons. It's two colors, you know, pretty straightforward. A new team. This was about uh how to get the best from everyone. And a lot of this is very gestalt for me. I just read the title or the Subtitle I don't read the books, never read the book. There's two ways to get information you could research and know everything on a subject or go in blind and I choose to go in blind. Um, but this is like, do team how to get the best from everyone. So I just had this funny hand that eventually, eventually the publisher was like, hey, you know, that, that's got six fingers. I'm like, yeah, there's more than five people on the team get it, but they're still like your body somehow. This is one of my favorites. Uh Do Walk, navigate Earth, mind and body step by step. And this is basically about a for written from a woman who basically walked around the earth. You know, I mean, it's all about walking and I just thought that this was the most charming, like simple way to show like legs walking. I love this one. It has a nice rag. I like the rag one. You like the design? I never pay attention to that. Um Do improvise so many of these titles are so difficult, like improvised. How do you do that? How do you do, do improvised? So I just had this kind of, to me, this kind of looks like uh when you see poster designers try to design um what music looks like or what jazz looks like, you know. So I had that, that was, that was, and it's just finger painting. Oh This was hilarious. This is due death, but it's called due death for a life better lived. So it was about like handling death. And if you've got loved ones who are dying or if you're dying, it's about living. It's more about living. And this is one instance when the author, author sent me artwork and guess what? She sent me an angel. No, not an angel. Death, green reaper or a skull, a skull, a skull. She wanted a skull in the front of her. I was like, no, this is the exact opposite. Now, you're pointing to death. I'm pointing to life, right? I have the son here and people are like people, I, I I've heard more than once that, that they're like you did you get your daughter to draw that? I'm like, no, you can't tell I did that I can draw too, you know. So, um no, I wish I would have gotten my daughter to draw. That would have been hilarious. Uh This is a really great one. This is do make the power of your own two hands, James Otter. He makes surfboards. He does workshops where you go into his workshop and in a few days you've styled yourself uh either a board or a paddle board. Like he just teaches people who like never touched a tool how to make stuff. So I thought it was just funny that his hands are probably dirty all the time, right? So it's got like, you know, where you would hold this book are the thumbprints. But this is the, this is an interesting one. This one, this was a, there was, this was published during a brief period when the do books was also being distributed by chronicle books. And whenever that happens, whenever things get, whenever money comes into the picture, it gets fucked up because you can't do that, you can't just throw money and have it work. So chronicle books came in and said, we don't like this about the cover. So the cover got changed. So originally um make the word make was um in the thumbnail, the thumb color and the thumbs were in the make cover, which was much more beautiful and made much more sense. But chronicle was like, no, we need, we need it to be different. So they, they actually changed the colors on me and it just came out like it just got published that way and it got sent to me and I'm like, wait, what's wrong with this? And I looked at the mechanical, I'm like, uh fuck, you know what I did about it? Nothing. What are you gonna do? Argue, be upset. Create bad blood. Now you move on. Don't fall in love with your work. Move on, right. Do fly find your way. Make a living, be your best self. Ah Gavin Strange. I know this guy. I know most of the authors. I have no idea what this cover means it doesn't have any meaning. It says pick me up. That's what it says. It says, hey, look at this. Oddly enough, since I said that whenever I see these published, I see them like this in a museum in the Tate Gallery at the moment somebody's gonna be in the museum and they, when, when bookstores and stuff get these books, they're like, oh, wow, look at this is a, this is a nice little museum which is exactly the way I designed it. I designed it to be a show. They're like little James Victoria posters. This is possibly my favorite. It's uh do preserve, make your own Jams, Chutneys, Pickles and Cordials, right? So this is, this to me was like, um I wanted to show Jam and jelly, right? So I uh just had a uh a purple paint and white paint and I made a, with my thumb, just made a little, little of jelly. Um And the authors got in touch with me and said, James, we love it. That looks like the most perfect Elderberry Jam. And that's always happened when I'm, when I, when I, when I, when I do a good job that happens so many times that happens, I've hit a nerve in, in the, you know, the author or the uh the, the, the, the, the creator