The making of the fourth edition of Mandership by Artemy Lebedev

We start by increasing the leading and making the headings less heavy.

Making the first general run through.

Looking at the result, analyzing, making a second run.

Getting to paragraph 173. Thinking what to do with the images of Ded Moroz (Father Frost, Russian version of Santa Claus) and Santa Claus. We can’t just take them from the website and use: not only do we need the images in high resolution, we also must have rights to use them. Giving this task to an intern and starting the search. Exploring the archives of libraries, museums and private collections. Turns out, all postcards that were chosen for publication were published by the USSR Ministry of Communications as well as Izogiz and Sovetsky Khudozhnik publishing houses by the order of the Ministry of Communications. Which means that the rights to the images belonged either to the publishing houses or to the Ministry of Communications. After the fall of the Soviet union all property and intellectual property rights were passed on to the Russian Ministry of Communications. Sending a formal query and receiving an official answer.

The search continues. Finding, choosing, scanning.

Simultaneously trying to find a high resolution image for paragraph 147.

Author (away on an expedition): I can’t access my work computer right now and it’s the only place I have that picture.

Trying to repeat the shot or make an entirely different one.

Doesn’t work. Oh well, we’ll have to retypeset.

Making the endpaper.

Starting to work on the dust jacket.

Designer: What do you think?

Art director: See § 157.

Art director: Another stylized design.

Thinking further.

And another one.

Art director: Can you make it so that there’s only one character which develops left to right instead of four characters developing vertically?

Art director: I want to see one character developing from upper left to lower right corner. Not three characters.

Art director: Nope, doesn’t look good. We need something else.

Art director: Let’s use an ampersand.

Art director: My eyes are bleeding. Give it to the type designer.

The type designer writes new ampersands with a fountain pen.

Art director: The style is all right, but instead of showing a variety of forms it has to show stages of transformation, like in animation.

Thinking how e and t transform into &.

Sweating over logical transition from one stage into the next. Sometimes the transition is too harsh which makes it unobvious how that shape came to be.

We need to draw it in such a way that would make the evolution clear to a person who knows nothing about ampersands.

Type designer: Logical enough now?

Art director: Yes, just remove the t’s tail in the fourth frame.

Making corrections, converting to vector. Deciding to keep the “live” outline the way it came out when it was written with a fountain pen.

Adding some color and sending the files to the print shop.