Design in my own Backyard

I’ve realized that while I’ve written of examples of design in our society, I’m looking so far out into the world that I’ve neglected what I know best. I was so occupied with learning that I forgot that I already knew a thing of two about design, because I’ve actually had a design job; all thanks to personal connections of course.

My dad, Brian Fies, is a science writer who moonlights as a graphic novelist. He has written two books so far but the one that I, my sister and our friends were a part of is his latest one, called Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? My dad was on a deadline and had 200 pages to color. The four of us of the younger generation had little design education but knew how to use Photoshop. I’m still not sure of the strength of our qualifications, but my dad took us on and paid us by the page.

One of the things I was most surprised by was the freedom my dad gave us with the project. When he gave us pages to color, we exchanged them through Photoshop files on flash drives, we received black and white comic pages and a palette much like this:

(This is actually an example of one that we were able to work with, but the colors on the far right changed depending on what part of the book we were working on…)

It was like we had been thrown into a crash course of color theory. The freedom was overwhelming in the beginning, but on the plus side we knew that my dad would change the colors to suit what he wanted if he really didn’t like what we had done. He also gave us a handful of notes for every grouping of pages he gave us if he wanted anything colored in a specific way. That was a security net of sorts that slowly allowed us to feel comfortable being colorists, and in the end, that was what allowed us to have fun with color palettes that he gave us. We composed the color on the pages as we went, mostly coloring only by gut instincts but slowly becoming bolder. We began to place colors not where they would be most natural but where we thought they would look good amongst all the other colors. And apparently we were teaching ourselves rather well. By the end of the project, my dad was writing fewer notes when he handed out our pages.

All in all, it was a very good experience for me at least. It showed me that design can be something learned on site as well as in the classroom. It also reminded me just how much thought goes into coloring even a single panel of a graphic novel, and that everything we use in daily life undoubtedly went through the same level of design planning. Ours is truly a well-thought-out world.

I would say more about making a comic book, but I try not to repeat things which have been said better than I could manage. If you want to learn more about the sort of design thinking that goes into making a graphic novel, go to my dad’s blog. On the right, after you scroll down, there are a series of tabs that list the labels of his post. I would suggest looking at both “How I Approach Cartooning” and “Making a Book.”