I was fortunate enough to be hired by Craig Shemin to create promotional materials for his new book, Sam and Friends The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show. I wrote about it in–depth last week, so please check that out first.
While the work was very exciting and fun, it really was a distant secondary project to the book as the pieces were intended to be handed out at events like the launch at The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Other than that though, I wasn’t expecting any public connection to the book online, and that was fine because just getting to be a small part of Jim’s legacy by distant proxy was satisfying enough for me. However, that all changed a few months later when in July, Craig floated the idea that he would need me to polish up the book’s cover now as well.
On a book like Sam and Friends, there are a checklist of items that have to be met for legal purposes. Craig had created a mock up of the cover understanding it would need to be punched up later, but its main purpose was to get clearance from all the legal sides of The Jim Henson and Walt Disney Companies. However when he approached me about this new addition, there were several things I needed to be brought up to speed on.
The first was obvious, the mock up Craig had created was approved, so I wouldn’t be creating any new concepts. The job was to create a more refined version. Period. The second was a huge surprise to me: there was no high resolution graphic of the Sam and Friends title! This was one of those “seeing behind the curtain” scenarios where I had just assumed the assets were tucked away somewhere in the archives. Now I was responsible for creating that high resolution asset and beyond everything I had done, this felt the most significant to me. I had created something of this asset partially when I designed the campaign poster of Sam that was one of the original promotional items, but now I would fine tune it—purple swirls and all—for future use of the book and whatever else the Jim Henson Legacy saw fit for as well. The third was a later surprise, and that was that Craig’s mock up had been shown and announced back in early 2021 and now I was being announced as the cover artist! My 15 minutes had officially started.
Several color and effect variations of the title
The last thing was something a little more nuanced. The television set used to frame the photograph of Jim, Sam, Kermit, Yorick, and Harry was art Jim Henson himself had created for the show. Unlike the set design style illustrations I had created for the promotional items, or even the Sam and Friends title card, Craig felt the television set art needed to remain Jim’s and therefore would stay intact as is. As a fan, I wholeheartedly agreed. As a graphic designer, this was a massive problem.
NOTE: While this is the actual art of the original TV set, the colored photo of Jim is Photoshopped into the image.
If you’ve ever looked at a digital picture on your phone and just zoomed in as far as you possibly can, eventually you’ll start to see distortion to the image. This is because a digital image is made up of hundreds if not thousands of individual pixels. When you print a digital image, there has to be so many of those pixels crammed into one square inch so that it looks good whereas the numbers of pixels per inch (PPI or DPI–dots per inch) on a screen can be considerably fewer. If an image is too small and you then blow it up/enlarge it, those pixels will be more visible in a ruddy way that will look really bad. It’s a good rule of thumb to enlarge such an image only 130% at most. Anything beyond that will start to show the physical dimensions are of a much lower quality.
Craig had super high resolution scans of almost everything, but for this television set alone to be increased just for the book cover (never mind any promotional uses that would require it even larger), it would need to be blown up 10 times larger which means it would look terrible in print. I suggested letting me recreate the art so that we could avoid every conceivable problem I could think of, but Craig was understandably hesitant. Fortunately, he also trusted me (especially because I told him we could trash it if he wasn’t happy with it), and I digitally painted everything down to the tiniest detail including the speaker and its screen. I also allowed for a humongous bleed area so that the wood grain of the set could easily wrap around the hard cover’s extended borders. Not only was Craig pleased with the result, but now that I had organized every single part into its own unique layer in Photoshop, we could tweak everything for alignment as well as the additional promotional pieces that would come to be, like a standing retractable banner. If that wasn’t helpful enough, my new painting was 200% larger than the necessary size of the cover.
Craig’s mock–up, my illustrated design update, and the Photoshop layers
Fortunately, the scans for the back cover were of a high enough quality that I didn’t need to mess with them too much. Again, having all the high resolution scans from the show weren’t just easier to work with, but very cool to have something I could really look at and enjoy months before the book was published.
The old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is always a thorn in a graphic designer’s side because creating book covers is literally our job. Craig was the perfect client to work for. He was very clear in his directions yet open to my suggestions. I wasn’t just providing him with my ability to create stuff for him but my years of experience as well. I don’t know how much any of those things played into his generous offers to have me join him when he signed copies of his book in Queens or be on the panel at New York Comic Con, but I was about to experience a whirlwind of notoriety and respect and it was super exciting.
The lined area for the dials now extends to the TV frame and the speaker mesh was painstakingly drawn with precision in Adobe Illustrator. The frame was digitally painted with a dry brush texture, the set itself was overlaid with a wood grain texture while the knobs have a felt texture over top.
Tune in next Friday when I share the last and most personal part of this story! Follow me on Instagram and Twitter and thanks for stopping by!