I received the first copies of Expectations today!
This afternoon two substantial packages arrived for me - the first copies of Expectations! Another thirty-odd pallets will be on their way to me in the next few days.
It's a strange feeling finally to hold the finished product in my hands, after all that work, sometimes worry, long conversations into the night, and bouncing ideas back and forth, and the occasional light bulb moment, usually around 4 in the morning when I knew I had to get out of bed and find a pen and paper or I would never be able to sleep.
The book makes it all worth it. It is, I think, and I am certainly biased, gorgeous. That's in no small part due to Kehrer Verlag's meticulous attention to detail, and of course, Nanni Goebel's design skills. If you have ever looked at any of my Room with a View pictures you'll know that I am into minimalism, geometry, clean lines. But more than that, the cover design is laden with symbolism. I'll do another post about the cover and the thought behind it when there is a moment, but in the meantime, here is the (cover of the) book, Expectations, ta da!:
Preparing the book I
A lot has been happening over the last few weeks, the brilliant designer Nanni Goebel has been working intensively on the layouts while I have been tweaking the texts, image editing and sequencing and now all the hard work is coming to fruition. Today the layouts have finally been finished, the proofreading is over, and it's final preparations before the actual printing in Heidelberg in just two weeks' time.
One of the most exciting things has been evolving the designs for the cover, and I'm really thrilled about what is emerging - it's going to be a highly graphic design but also with hidden symbolism that reflects the whole idea of the book. Just the kind of thing that I really love: graphic form + symbolism = a happy me. The cover will be quite different from the provisional look of the book as it appeared in the Kehrer catalogue.
I'm not going to show what the cover looks like, that can wait until the book is out, but today I've been looking through a first set of test prints with images printed actual size on the paper that has been chosen (these aren't layouts I should add, just images squashed together for colour correction purposes). Still some tweaks to go, but the first physical impression of pages I've had in my hands:
You can see more of Nanni's work here: www.mooimind.com