Saturday 3 January 2015

Restoration Bulletin-- GOAT redesign?

Sean Michael Robinson:

Greetings everyone!

One last fax from Dave that I'll be posting today, this one concerning the "GOAT" story, originally published as a back-up feature in the monthly Cerebus book. As such it has the "Unique Stories" banner running along the top of the page, and is visually a little incongruous with the surrounding material.

(The other thing that makes it a little strange is that in the monthly book, the first page was a verso page, i.e. on the left, and in the High Society book it became a recto page, which means that what was initially double page spreads are now bleeds instead.)

So! Anyone want to take a crack at redesigning these pages in mockup form?

Dave's fax--


The pages up for grabs are 309-312 in the collected High Society. 

8 comments:

Jeff Seiler said...

Without looking at all four pages just now, I'd say lose the Unique Stories banner and footnote that "this story originally appeared as an Unique Stories entry in the back of Cerebus issue #whatever".

And, then, move "GOAT" up and center it as a new banner.

The other pages, I can't say without looking at them and I'm still at Ryan's Pub in downtown Minneapolis, watching the NFL playoffs.

Okay, that's me.

Out.

Scott Yoshinaga said...

Here's my quick take on GOAT. Not sure if it's OK to move the text around but I felt if the actual page was going to be on the right side of the book, there should be some context. Also got rid of the Unique Story logo entirely although I tried to play around with it in conjunction with the GOAT heading but it looked out of place. Maybe a small text that says "A short aside." or something under the GOAT heading would work.

Here's a link to my take on it: http://d.pr/f/1aUeD

Scott Yoshinaga said...

One more thing...
My only other thought on this would be to redo the typesetting dialog, but maybe you are already doing that?

Jason Penney said...

How much does it throw things off to insert some sort of "blank" page to restore the spreads? The Golden Age Marvel Masterworks books would occasionally have a full page "Timely Comics" logo, for example, to achieve this.

George Peter Gatsis said...

Already did that for the first round of restoration work...

Sean you already have the extended bleed files and cleaned up logo...

George

George Peter Gatsis said...

and cleaned up layout.

George (again)

Tom Palmer Jr said...

Is it possible to expand Goat to 6 pages? If so, here's a way to redesign the story so that the original spreads remain intact:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tk699d1zz0wp4f1/goat.zip?dl=0

(The new page 1 is the original title lettering with a bit of the smoke enlarged and bleeding off the bottom of the page.
New pages 2 and 3 are the original first spread, but with the title lettering and Unique Story banner removed. I cloned the smoke so that it now rises up off the top of the page.
New pages 4 and 5 are the original second spread, except the final two "transcript copy..." lines have been removed as well as the figures of Julius and the goat.
And new page 6 is the two "transcript" lines from the original last page with the figures of Julius and the goat at the bottom of the page.)


Sean R said...

Hey Scott,

That's GREAT! Thanks for making it! I don't know why I find that so funny-- both text moves you made definitely hilight the humor.

Hey George,

Thanks for pointing that out! They look great-- I'll be sure to use the cleaned up banners if the layout stays the same.

Hey Tom,

Great idea! Love the ramped-up significance of the smoke drift... Yeah, it would be possible to extend the sequence by two pages. We'll see what Dave has to say about it!

Thanks everyone for your thoughts! I've made a separate post with the two versions. Please take a look if you have a chance and let Dave know your thoughts....