How Your Watermark is Made Part 1: Ideas and Sketches

The Conception

The conception of this cover begins in the same place all of Watermark‘s content begins: the editorial meeting. Every other Monday, Editor-in-Chief Steve Blanchard, Online Media Director Jamie Hyman, and I get together to hash out our thoughts on the issue we’re currently completing and bounce around ideas on future issues and discuss possible design ideas and avenues to take for the proposed covers, major news stories, photo galleries, etc. For issue 19.03, we decided the cover should feature our story on how and if the redistricting measure affects the LGBT community and currently serving LGBT politicians.

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Research

 The first step of any original Watermark cover is research. How else are you going to know what you’re going to do if you don’t know what has already been done?

I jump on my computer and point my browser to Google Images, type in “redistricting” and see what pops up.

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Most of the results are just a bunch maps of voting districts in various states, which is not really what I’m looking for in a cover image. But, peppered throughout the maps are a few political cartoons to provide me with direction and inspiration.

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I was really drawn to the image of the donkey (Democrats) and elephant (Republicans) both angrily painting their claimed districts on a map of Texas. This seemed to be a pretty digestible way to visually present a concept like “redistricting.” I decided that this would be great starting point for the cover design.

So, we have an idea! Now what?

Sketches. That’s what.

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The Tools

 Bic Pen, Medium Point
Pad of paper, or whatever is lying around.

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Sketches

 So, I now have a loose concept of the cover design bouncing around in my head and it’s time to start sketching. I grab a pad of notepaper and start rattling out some quick thumbnail sketches to decide, in a very loose manner, how the different elements are going to arrange on the cover. Each sketch only takes about 30 seconds to complete. At this stage I like to work with a standard Bic medium point pen. I can move fast without having to sharpen and, because it doesn’t erase, I have to redraw the entire sketch if I make a mistake or my scribble become confusing. Each quick redraw presents a better solution than its predecessor.

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I gotta give a special thanks to Patrick at Snap! for handing me a small pad of paper when I met him. The dimensions of the pages are perfect for doing quick thumbnail sketches.

Now, I go through my handful of sketches and decide I will go with the sketch of the donkey and elephant having a scuffle in front of a large canvas that has a sloppy red and blue painting of Florida‘s districts, while a gay person looks at the canvas in bewilderment:

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I felt that this sketch captures all of the things Watermark needs in a cover: Ample space allotted for large main cover lines and sub-headlines on the side, illustrates the story, and provides my own bit of artistic commentary on the situation. I take that thumbnail, make a larger, tighter sketch.

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That sketch gets scanned it into the computer, cleaned up a little bit, and I overlay a template of the basic cover elements (masthead, datelines, etc.). I do a bit of cut’n paste to move pieces of the sketch around things around a bit so that they more precisely fit within the template overlay. Now I slap on a bit of quick color and some fake cover lines and email a JPEG to Editor-in-Chief Steve Blanchard and wait for his approval.

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Good news! Steve likes it. We get the go-ahead to go crazy! But that, dear reader, will have to wait until Part 2.