Book plates for the libraries

In my last post here (two weeks ago—I know), I told you about how I set up a form on the Hairy Eyeballs site where you could request a free book for your local public library.

Well, things haven't exactly gone as planned (as if they ever do)...

About five days after that post I totally migrated all my sites, emails and domain names out of GoDaddy's life. Lots of work. Lots of nail-biting. Lots of "Yay! I did it!" I'll have to tell you about that at a later date. All you need to know right now is that the form I sent you to in the last post? Yeah. That's not working at the moment. It looks like I'm going to have to do a little coaxing for that to happen, so don't expect anything out of that form until further notice.

What I was able to accomplish over the last couple of weeks was get the books that were already requested ready to ship out. I designed a book plate for inside the front cover of each book showing what library the book was donated to and who requested the donation.

And here it is, all fancy-shmancy like:

And now for the totally geeky colophon stuff:

The main font is ITC Blackadder, designed by Bob Anderton for Linotype. It reminds me of a treasure map, which felt right for the design.

The "Pittsburgh, PA" font is VT Portable Remington, designed by Susan Townsend and was also used for the chapter titles and page numbers in the book.

The handwriting in the background is a couple of images of Leonardo da Vinci's writing that I melded together in Photoshop. Here's a cool Leonardo handwriting generator that lets you type in words to see what they might have looked like if Leo had written them.

The Hairy Eyeballs Press logo was hand drawn by me during breaks at my day job. Just a little mindless doodling and there you go.