Lauren brought up the Weird Book Room assignment and I thought it really ought to be called Wired Book Room. So here’s my entry: Accessorizing Your Waterfowl.

I had a few title ideas, like Duck Bling or Pimp My Duck, but I thought they were too slang for that classy necklace. I wanted to make the image more graphic or illustrative or whatever. I duplicated the background layer so I could mess around without messing it up. Then I went into Image->Adjustments->Levels and played around with the sliders to boost the contrast and brighten it up a bit. I duplicated the layer again and tried Filter->Stylize->Find Edges, which made this weird sort of tracing of the image. I didn’t know if I could use it or not, so I clicked the layer visibility button to hide it for now. I went back to my other copy of the layer and tried the Image->Adjustments->Posterize function and changed the levels to 3 or 4. I didn’t like the top of the bar in the picture so blacked it out. I turned on my weird tracing layer and changed the layer blending mode to Darken, and I kind of liked the effect. I needed a better image of the diamond necklace though, so I went back to my original layer, without all the distortions, and carefully selected around the necklace and copied and pasted it. I played with the levels to brighten it and put some sharpening on it, and thought I had a good image to work with.

With waterfowl in the title, I figured it should be a Penguin Book. They’ve been acquired by Random House, so I used the Random Penguin name. I googled penguin books to find the logos.

I went with a condensed typeface due to the kind of space I had – more of a functional decision than an aesthetic one. I let Stephen L. Miles be the author, playing off that little inside joke from the episode. I thought the cover should have some more copy so I asked my wife what it should say. She was on to the bling thing too.

I thought about it some more, and that posterize effect was too busy. I went back and filled the duck outline with white, then I brought the eye back in. I think that’s a little more essence of duck.