Magnolia Studio Portfolio Item, Synchronistic, The Book
Creatively Meticulous Designs
portfolio item
Synchronistic, The Book
Synchronistic, The Book
R.O.R. Productions, Santa Rosa, California
©2013, Ashley Isaac Stevens
All photographs by Muiz Brinkerhoff — The Visible Impressions Project
VisibleImpressions.com
As a book designer I am often hired to help with projects through unusual connections. This wonderful novel full of poetry, songs, and photography illustrating an incredible story of love, loss, insanity, passion and compassion actually was a product of "synchronicity." Three talented people being in the same place at the same time…
While taking certification classes for Adobe InDesign at Santa Rosa Junior College, I began learning the basics of HTML coding and CSS styling for web sites. My HTML/CSS professor, Muiz Brinkerhoff, instructed me as I built a web site which focused on my extensive graphic design portfolio. Another student wanted help with editing and publishing a novel and we began discussing the scope of his project. [ … Read More ]
As we embarked upon the developmental editing process we realized that typography would play a major part in the novel. The look and feel of each text feature had to be unique; multiple characters, including the narrator, as well as radio plays, song lyrics and poetry — made this a special challenge. For example, transitioning smoothly between the storyline, a quote, and the inner dialogue was achieved through changing fonts, boxing elements, two-column formats, and creative typographic shapes.
We discovered that our professor was also an incredible photographer — VisibleImpressions.com — and we arranged to license 22 of his images. I then carefully began to incorporate these images into the design and layout of this beautiful book. Choosing only those photographs that invoked the emotion and text of the many stories and poetry was a joy because we were granted access to Muiz's incredible catalog of photographs.
I designed a full color cover using Muiz's brilliant "Sun in Springhead Mill Pond" image with black interior text and color photographs in a 216-page, 8x10 inch, perfect-bound volume. I chose a quality online book printer and the publisher printed a short run of 100 copies, and R.O.R. Productions soon requested another printing. This novel and it's sequel "6ix Minutes", are the inspiration for several multi-media presentations by R.O.R. Productions. [ Read Less ]
The Bitter End
The Dragonfly
The Dialog
This Story Begins
Act 2 Scene 4
Act 2 Scene 5
Reflections Proverb
As She Pulled Away
The Rose
The Radio
The Mice
The Trees
It's time Ashley
The Eighth Stage
Client Testimonial
November 7, 2016
"Phyllis is a great editor, but not only that, during the time we were working together she took a personal approach that was understanding of the busy schedules that we all have... she found times that would work for me. She also was able to capture the concepts I was writing about in a way that allowed me to expand on my work, rather than ever feeling led. As an editor, she has a very special gift of connecting with her clients and pulling the best out of them. In that way she is a muse and not just the editor and designer of one's work.
"Thank you again Phyllis, for helping my dream come true."
AndE Adamson — Founder and Director of R.O.R. Productions