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Fotovue

This project for Fotovue and Alyn Wallace is one of our favourites.

The Night Sky by Alyn Williams

About Fotovue

Fotovue work with the best landscape and outdoor photographers to produce and publish high-quality visitor and photo-location guidebooks. One of their flagship projects of the last few years has been the mammoth tome, Photographing the Night Sky, authored by world-famous photographer Alyn Wallace.

The Challenge

This was a huge project for Fotovue – Alyn Wallace is a photographer of international renown – and a significant budget had been devoted to it. Supporting illustrations needed to be:

Clear and Accurate

This is a given for a technical manual; if an illustration is wrong or inaccurate, it is worse than useless. If an illustration is hard to follow, then it is worthless.

Engaging

Dozens of photographers featured their best photos in the project; the illustrations needed to be bold and visually engaging if they were not going to detract from the finished book.

Attractive

If the photos were to be great and the graphic design was to be great; then, to do the work justice, the illustrations needed to be beautiful too.

The Solution

It turns out, the solution was Little Fire Digital.

What Did Little Fire Digital Do?

Having impressed the client and author with some early visuals, Fotovue were enthused with our understanding and technical mindset. It was clear that we had the technical mindset and the visual flair to make this project work.

At every stage of the process we worked in close liaison with Alyn and the graphic designer, Nathan at Ryder Design (Probably the best multi-disciplinary graphic designer, specialising in book design®, in his street).

We fished out our preferred 3D modelling tool, Blender.
Next, we went to the NASA website and downloaded a load of image maps. We made new scenes in Blender: making light sources from the stars and wrapping the image maps onto spheres … and we built some planets.
Finally, we brought the finished renders into photoshop for fine-tuning and illustrator for annotation.

Working closely with Alyn, we built simple diagrams in Adobe Illustrator. Keeping distracting detail to a minimum but the content clear and the image engaging.

Shade of Midsummer Night's Dream
Shade of Midsummer Night's Dream

We built composite images, merging photography (whose accuracy we could not match) and illustrations (for maximum clarity).

We wrecked our graphics cards and had a whole pile of fun.

The Outcome

What did Fotovue make of it all?

The book made 75% of the total production budget in a single week … and the hardback edition sold out fast.

The clients were delighted. Alyn was nice enough to big us up on his YouTube channel.

Alyn Williams: Thank you Simon for exceeding my expectations and being a pleasure to work with.

The feeling is mutual

Want This Book?

Of course you do. You should treat yourself.

Got a Project Like This?

Of course you have. You should contact us.