Caveat Lector

So I promised colleagues a while back that I’d do up some marketing materials for the repository. And there’s nothing like a nice flyer, right?

I have no budget. Repository-rats never do. Hey, we work on open access, what do we need money for? So I can’t do spiffy four-color stuff; I run on a strictly grayscale basis. I mention this not to whinge, but to point out that it’s a pretty serious design constraint in a full-color world.

I also don’t have Photoshop (see above about “no budget”), so I’m working with the GIMP.

The story I wanted to tell in this particular flyer is “Librarians have always cared for your books and your journals… now we take care of your digital works too!” (I dearly hope that’s both/and enough to be inoffensive. I’m never sure about these things.)

So I got the bottom half done fairly quickly. Screenshot, list of Things To Put In The IR with nice arrows pointing to the screenshot. (The GIMP doesn’t do auto-shapes such as arrows. Google kindly informed me that the way to do arrows is to use a wingdings font at a suitably-enlarged size. Worked a treat.) Logo, URL, and contact info at the bottom. No sweat. (Well, some sweat, because ever so not graphic designer. But it wasn’t bad.)

And then there was the top half…

My first thought was a photomontage of books and libraries and stuff. I zipped over to Flickr, searched materials marked with the Creative Commons Attribution license on the tags “books” and “library” and whomped one together with the results. It looked stupid and square and amateurish. I got rid of it, though I kept its individual components.

Going back to my search turned up these awesome old-book cutouts. I snagged one and got to work.

My first thought was to outline the book, cut the outline away from its background, and use the background as a border for photos. The way to do this is not by tracing with the mouse; I figured that one out in two seconds flat. Google to the rescue again—the way to do it is to blow up the picture a bit and use the Bezier path tool. This lets you select points all around the outline of your thing, turn that outline into a selection, and clear everything inside it. Once I grokked the concept, I had my outline pretty quickly.

So I slapped the outline back on the flyer and popped a few photos in behind it. And I printed it out. And it didn’t look too bad… people know what an open book looks like in outline, don’t they?… it’ll work, kinda… okay, okay, it looked like a squashed butterfly with ragged wings. No good. Try again, genius.

My next idea was to outline the top pages and the edges of a couple pages underneath—again, the Bezier tool lets you do this—and layer photos as though it were a book of photos. After a while, it became clear this wasn’t going to turn out well, so I abandoned it.

And then, finally, I did the right thing. Outline the open pages, recto and verso, clear the interior of the outline, pop the photos underneath, and leave the rest of the book image alone. This? Looked awesome after a bit of photo tweakage. Even in grayscale it looks good.

I had my husband critique it, and I’m going to fix a couple of layout and font issues tomorrow. But in the main, I am well content.

A graphic designer would have figured this out in much less time than I took. But I added a few tools to my amateur’s arsenal, so I consider it time reasonably well spent.