Book Design - Steam

After many hissy fits and several threats to give up entirely I finally finished my book.
PHEW. Am I ever glad that ordeal is over.

I wrote the entire manuscript. Something I never want to do again. I'll be quite happy letting actual authors do the dirty work from now on.

It's got a faux-leather cover, red endpapers, a red ribbon, several stamps (that alternate between gold stamped or blind stamped) on the cover and spine, and a red bellyband (with another gold stamp). You wish you had one of these. They're actually kind of snuggly, if I book can be snuggly.

I won't go into all the drama of the making of this monster.
Needless to say it caused much undue stress and plenty of sleepless nights.

Typeface Design

I invented a typeface!
Am I excited about it? Oh yes. Very. Typing doesn't do this justice.

We spent the entire term sketching, refining, and eventually kerning (that was a huge pain and I doubt I'll ever be finished with the kerning) our respective typefaces.

Other than the actual invention of the typeface we had to create a promotional piece of some sort to help advertise. This is the promotional piece for mine (one of the two - the second suffered through a rather terrible photoshoot and I haven't salvaged a picture of it just yet).
It's a roughly 36" long, accordion-fold, type specimen (and a huge pain in my butt).
Nobody wants to print one copy of a 36" x 5.5" student project. 500 of them sure. But not one.

Other than the usual printing-as-a-student drama I love this. I love the typeface. I love life.
It still needs a lot of work. It's a working typeface (I had a little joy fit when I first typed with it) but it still needs a lot of technical refinement.

The missing thing (which you'll see as soon as I fix the pictures) is a little rocket ship that was a companion piece to the big folded specimen. It was full of white chocolate wafers that had the entire alphabet (upper and lower case) carved into the faces.