For newcomers, Fuselit is the hand-bound-and-built literary magazine Kirsty and I produce, while Sidekick Books is our small press. Doing both has caused us some ‘brand confusion’ in the past, with our anthologies being occasionally attributed to ‘Fuselit Press’ and some people thinking we bind our own books. It doesn’t help that Sidekick Books grew out of the bonus booklets we used to make to accompany each Fuselit issue. Hopefully, by early next year we’ll have sorted it out so that everything is clear and obvious to the casual internet user without our having to resort to double lives.
Anyway, I’d been making notes on improving on the old Dr F site for so long that it got to the point where it was easier to start afresh. With buoyant idiocy, I predicted it would take me one weekend, with possibly a few evenings afterward for trouble-shooting.
Ha.
It’s been, I think, a couple of months of on/off work to get this far (on/off because there are a million other things we’re supposed to be doing). During that time, I ran through a few different designs, spent an inordinate amount of time with my head in my hands and changed the art style significantly. This was one of the first banner images I drew up:
I’ve never been very comfortable with my role as house artist/illustrator for our projects but seeing as any other solution would involve either money or some poor art school graduate being cruelly demoralised by my constantly demanding changes and redrafting, it’s me we’re stuck with.
I’ll say a little more about the process in future posts. This is really just a space filler!
