Steel Bananas: August 2009.

Steel Bananas Issue 10, August 2009 is live.

This month’s issue features the Toronto Greek street festival, A Taste of the Danforth, where our resident food critic Ted Killin samples some of Greek Town’s finest and learns something about olive oil. Also, an interview with Indie Rock Icon Joel Plaskett, an essay on elitism, Twilight, and an exclusive walk through of indie game developer Capybara Studio’s offices.

I did the cover this month again, and I have to say I am extremely happy with how it turned out. I went in a little different direction this time, instead of using something strictly photo based like I have done in the past.

The night that Ted and I had coordinated to be our joint venture to The Danforth turned out to be a total wash weather wise, it rained from when we got there, until we left. I had planned to just document the sights, tastes and sounds of our trip to The Danforth, and hopefully a cover shot would ensue from that process. But the rain spoiled that. Onto plan b.

In the back of my head I had this itch to break out the graphic designer in me, and rely on something more graphic. Instead of photographing the environment, I instead decided to photograph as much food as I could, in a straight on, straight-photography way. I knew I wanted to make some sort of collage, maybe something (as much as I hate him) Warhol-esque, based on a grid – a wallpaper of food if you will. So I went about our romp up and down Danforth, in the rain, photographing as much food as I possibly could. Ted bought some spinach squares. I asked him to take a bite out of his spinach square. I photographed it. Then it started raining harder, I had to find some shelter to shoot under – umbrellas on the side walks solved that.  I had a chicken pita, and photographed it.

SB Nerd King Frankenstein bought souvlaki, and to much surprise, I photographed it. King Frankenstein then bought freshly shucked oysters, “WE SHUCK ‘EM, YOU SUCK EM,” shouted the shuckers. I photographed those too. Ted bought some ice cream crepes, which I photographed and then realized, there’s no way we’re going to have enough money, time, or stomach capacity to grab all the food shots I need for the cover. I resorted to loitering the ends of the food lines to spy on what people were buying, and took photos of their food instead – with permission of course. I got the kalamari shot this way.

Then I remembered the corn. I needed to have a shot of some corn. A couple of gnarly men walked by me half way through their corn on the cob. I ran up to them and asked, “Can I take a photo of your cob?” There were a few brief seconds of awkwardness, then I repeated, “Can I take a photo of your corn on the cob?” The men looked at me funnily again. “What’s this for? Some weird corn website?” I explained to them what Steel Bananas was, and they abliged.

I had all my photos, now I just needed to make a cover out of it. I masked out all the photos I had, and tried to get the food/pattern/grid concept to work, but it wasn’t really happening. Maybe if I shot the food in a studio, where I could control all the variables and lock the camera off so that the size relationships were exact, then maybe, but it wasn’t working that way. Then I got the table-cloth idea, it is sort of similar to what I did a few issues back with Ted’s vegan restaurant review. Off to my linen closet to see if I had a suitable table cloth or tea towel. I found a blue and white one, and photographed it in my little make-shift home studio with an SB-600 powered way up and triggered wirelessly. Not a coincidence: blue and white references the Greek flag. No need to mask it out as it was just going to be the background. Curves, hue, saturation and sharpening, and threw it into Illustrator. I have a template created for the cover in Illustrator with separate layers for the Header, Copy, Images, and notes.

I chose to assemble all of my masked out images with background in Illustrator in case I wanted to put text under neath the images of food, but above the table cloth. This means I had to create drop shadows in Photoshop, then save as a .psd on a transparent background to get them to show up in Illustrator. I usually shy away from layer effects and blending, but I felt I needed to do it here. As with most things in Photoshop, if you do it subtly enough, it won’t be a problem. The shadows are hardly noticeable, but add a sense of believability that the image is real when it is in fact a composite of many images taken under different lighting conditions.

Next up was the copy. Futura LT Medium is used for all cover copy. I said before I wanted to use some sort of graphic element in the cover this month. I have this weird thing I like to do when I’m designing. I like to visually connect or create relationships between alike or similar elements, either by lines, colours or divisions to sort of say ‘this is connected to this, and connected to this, and connected to this, but its all a part of this.’ Doing this creates a sort of visual-vocabulary for a design and creates visual interest. Sometimes the relationships are obvious, sometimes they are obscure, either way I think it’s interesting. I kind of did this with the line work in my Millennium Certificate, but more so with my self-promo, where the colour coded blocks on the bottoms of the card represent the illustrations and objects depicted in the card.

For this month’s cover I used lines and circles extending from “A TASTE OF THE DANFORTH” to connect the ‘Taste of the Danforth’ with the different foods we tasted there. I then connected the different foods to create a sort-of web of relations between the foods, the Danforth, and the article. For the lead-in image to go with the cover story, I added more lines linking the names of the food, as well as the prices. I used Orator Standard for this, its a nice font which reminds me of Letter Gothic. Orator comes ‘slanted,’ although I wouldn’t call it italics. The food names and prices add to the web of information and relationships that I think sort of overwhelms you when you first look at it, which is what I wanted. I opted to not use the food names and prices in the cover because I found it too distracting.

Finally, exported the file from Illustrator to Photoshop. Since Steel Bananas is strictly online and not print, I don’t have to worry about high resolutions or dpi – 72 will do just fine, and I can work in jpegs, not pdfs. I gave the file some more curves to bring out the highlights, de-saturated slightly, played with the colour balance to add a bit of 70′s film warmth, selective curves to give the yellows in the lines some more punch, and finally one more round of sharpening – this time it was selective, only the parts that needed it.

And that’s how this month’s SB cover was born.

Cover Story: Mediterranean Madness ’09, the Latest Chapter in Danforth history!