From Matt Baker at Useful Charts: This chart shows how the letters used to write English (and many other languages) evolved from Proto-Sinaitic, through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter.

For obvious reasons, this hits my Venn Diagram of my love for Biblical languages (Hebrew & Greek) and my love for typography and design. This one may find its way onto my office wall as a print.

I'll admit, sometimes I get a little carried away with stuff. 

When I get a good design in my head, it just has to get out. So when Paul Spurlin of Adventures in Ministry (AIM) contacted me about getting Ministry Bits on their podcast network, he wanted to some design assistance as well. 

Paul never approved or asked for a redesign. I was just presumptuous and sent him my idea. Fortunately for me, he really loved it. 

I won't talk about the old design, just the new one. I wanted to first simplify, simplify, simplify. As is with any project I tackle. I haven't done many logo redesigns, so this was rare for me. 

AIM Logo, version 1.0

AIM 2.0

One thing Paul said was that he liked the navy blue and gray colors. I was trying to find a way to incorporate this into the redesign while not taking anything away from the new logo. 

The result was a simple, two-tone effect made possible by the "crosshairs" that center on the "I" in AIM. Slightly slanted to give a alternate, moving effect, the two colors in the logo actually blend nicely. The font used was a standard modern font names Avenir Next, a favorite of typographers and designers lately. I used the "Heavy" weight for all the lettering. The only custom letter is the "A," which I added a missing strip on the left side to distinguish it just a bit more. 

The crosshairs in the new design accomplish three purposes. 1) It gives focus to the new dynamic of the logo, 2) it forms a cross, which is the universal Christian symbol, and 3) It gives an impression of seeking and hitting your mark. This is exactly what the underlying mission of Adventures in Ministry is all about: hitting your mark to make the most impact on spreading the Gospel and bringing people to God. 

The best thing about designing simple things is that most times they're actually simple to design. As I was testing out ideas for the logo, what did I use in Photoshop for the design? The Eraser and Paint Bucket tools. That's right. No fancy drawing in Illustrator, no vectorizing. Just simple typing the A-I-M out, getting my kerning the way I want it, rasterizing the type, and then working to erase the lines of the crosshairs the way I want them to look. 

Detail on the crosshairs.

The most difficult thing to accomplish was the rounded edges on the center of the crosshairs. I had to go in a basically erase pixel by pixel to get the exact curvature I wanted. This gave the crosshairs a "sweeping out" effect, if you will, as if they were moving.

All in all, I'd say the redesign was a smashing success. I'd never intended to come in as the AIM guys had invited me in and make sweeping changes, but I had an idea, ran with it, and took a chance and presented it to Paul. Usually, as a designer, that can go two ways. You're super-excited about an idea and when you pitch it to the client, but they hate it. Or worse, they're indifferent and don't have the gumption to tell you that they hate it. But Paul was honest with me in the design and said "I just want to keep that this way with these colors" and so on. Luckily, he loved the final design, and it is now AIM's official logo, both on the website and the app on iOS and Android. 

I am so very happy to be working with Paul, Eric, Jon, and Andrew on this venture. I see a lot of great things coming down the pipe. 

You can check out Adventures in Ministry, where they have links to the podcast network, devotionals and songs for download, as well as full resources like classes and retreats. Head over there and download some good stuff!

I was honored last year when Michael Whitworth approached me about a special book he was putting together called Thoughts From The Mound, a collection of writings by Jeff Jenkins. I was thrilled and honored when he asked me to design the cover. 

He wanted something simple, and actually used the phrase "maybe one of those comfy chairs overlooking some rolling hills." I was happy to oblige. 

Photography normally isn't my strong suit, so in order to make the cover as great as possible, I need to make technology work for me. 

I start out with sheer volume. I shot over 60 photos for the cover and picked only one. Professionals would actually shoot a lot more, perhaps hundreds of shots before settling on one that they could use. Overall, I took just over 100 total photos from about 3 different views. 

Location and time of day were extremely important as well. Whereas some photographers would be able to shoot in a variety of different types of weather, I realize that I'm not that good - neither at Photoshop or at shooting in variable weather. I wait for a clear day before I go shoot. 

The location happned to be in a church member's front yard, so it worked out for me to stay there and do what I needed to do that afternoon for as long as I needed. The chair was actually the church secretary's. The Bible on the edge of the chair was mine. 

The photos were shot using a standard 18-55mm lens on a Canon D3100. The original resolution was 4608 x 3072 and I shot in RAW+JPEG format. There are lots of benefits to shooting in RAW that I won't go into, but basically you shoot with all the data available to you to edit later. Much larger photos in size, but you get all that data to work with. This is a great thing especially if you know you're going to take something into Photoshop. 

I took a variety of shots stooping, sitting, and standing. I didn't fiddle with light settings too much at all, and I let the camera and its auto-focus do most of the work. 

One of my fallacies in shooting photography is to want to compose the actual cover in my shot while I'm shooting. What I mean by that is I'm trying to frame the cover and make it look like the final product while I'm shooting. You're not supposed to do this, but I did anyways. Given the fact that I only had one lens, I pretty much had to. 

I wanted to compose the cover with the chair facing what would be the spine of the book. I don't know if this a rule or not, but it seems to be a good one. 

After shooting the photos I take them into Photoshop. This is where the transformation begins. I make sure to set my canvas to the appropriate size and resolution (in this case 5.5 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall, CMYK mode for printing, at 300 dpi). After cropping to appropriate size, I first I run Unsharp Mask to make sure everything on the picture is as sharp as it can be. I then make a Levels Adjustment Layer and bring the levels on the photo up or down based on the Levels Histogram. This evens out brightness and contrast pretty well usually, and I don't have to fiddle with that anymore. 

View fullsize

Next is color adjustment. I really want the hills to pop and be the most significant thing you see besides the title. I make a seperate Color Adjustment Layer and slighly adjust the hills to look more green. Not too much, since they're already very green anyways. 

The next thing I focus on is the blue sky. I use the Burn tool with a pretty high brush size (usually about 200 pixels or higher) in the Midtones range with an Exposure at 50%. I have "Protect Tones" checked while doing this. I lightly touch up the top of the sky just enough but not enough to interfere with the overall look. I've already decided the title is going to go in the top left. 

I then work on the blur at the bottom right. I didn't need the blur to be obvious, I actually needed it to be subtle enough that you could ignore it. Jeff's author title will go here, so I need you to see the bottom of the chair but not be distracted by the detail of the chair. I use the Blur tool and a big brush to get the desired effect that I want. The Blur tool will layer on top of the effect you just made, so making the blur on top of another blur will just intensify that blur. I make sure the blur is most intense at the corner and work out. 

Titling comes last. I used the font PerpetuaTitlingMT Light and varied the sizes in the title to make sure it was a well-designed layout. Simple and effective. I place a very subtle Drop Shadow under the text (about 4 pixels distance). 

After saving into a variety of formats (PNG, JPEG, PDF) I send it to Michael. Cover is done. 

So I hope you've enjoyed this step-by-step process for designing a book cover. I'd designed covers before, but never for a publication and never with my own photography. I think it turned out pretty great.