This was a voucher I designed during my time at Tour America for novel, 4am in Las Vegas by Michelle Jackson. I was given the text, dimensions and asked to include a Las Vegas image. Finding the right image proved a lot trickier than I anticipated as most images of Las Vegas aren’t free to use because of the amount of flashy ads and logos in them. Tour America had a Shutterstock account so it was just a question of finding one that would fit and wouldn’t have the copyright police after us.
I designed the voucher in full colour thinking that it would be like a flyer insert that was slipped into the cover of the book. Little did I know, the day that the flyer was sent off to the publishers after having been approved by the Tour America team, that the publisher would get back in touch to say “Oh by the way, it has to be black and white.” Gaaahhhh!!! It wasn’t going to be a flyer, it was going to printed on a leaf of the book. Back to the drawing board.
The voucher looked rubbish when it was changed to black and white in Photoshop. No matter how much fiddling I did with contrast and whatnot, the Vegas photo just looked awful with the colour sucked out. So my quick solution was to get back onto Shutterstock and get a vector graphic of this Vegas sign instead. So it turned out like this in the end…
I think you still get the effect of the old style movie ticket that I used for the voucher even in black and white. The Welcome to Las Vegas sign has such a nostalgia attached to it that I went for the Americana style with the voucher using free font Lobster. It has that look of old hand drawn retro signage. I was really chuffed when they sent a copy of the book to the office so I could have a look at my work on the inside cover. And sure you have to bring it home to show your mam don’t ya?
It's All Bright 