I finally got my copy of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries Edition of Pride and Prejudice! I started working on designing it back in March, and now it finally exists as a real book. Keep reading to learn more about what went into designing it, and check out The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube if you’re completely lost.
The illustration on the cover of the book was drawn by Valeria Bogado. Isn’t it just the most gorgeous thing? She sent me the illustration as a PSD, which I adjusted into the correct size for the cover, and added the spine and all the text.
Underneath the book above you can see the Lizzie Bennet flowchart I designed as well as the Everyone Deserves Tea mug that I also designed. While the book doesn’t fit into exactly the same design family as those merchandise items, the designs for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries have been kind of all over the place, and I’m really happy with the book as a standalone object.
One more shot of the cover illustration. Isn’t it just beautiful?
On the inside front and back covers, I had the idea to include a grid of photos from key moments in the web series. Originally I had wanted to include one screenshot with each chapter, but it just became too big of a job to match up each episode with exactly where it happened in the book. So instead I jumbled them all up, even including a couple screenshots from Lydia and Maria’s spinoff series. This was still a big job – I had to go through all the episodes taking each screenshot and individually saving and placing them in the InDesign file. But I think it came out really well and really adds a nice Lizzie Bennet touch to the book where otherwise it’s just plain text.
The font I used for the titles is Anna Clara. It came with a ton of extra swashes, so I could mix up what the chapter titles looked like, and I just think it’s a really beautiful font. The body text is Mrs. Eaves, which was designed by a woman, so I thought it was appropriate for this story.
The book includes an exclusive foreward by Hank Green about how he came up with the idea for the show and his thoughts on how it came out.
Once you stick it on a bookshelf, it really does look like a real book! There were quite a few hurdles to finishing the book, such as some of the production instructions being in Korean, and the cover file being so big that it took my computer 15 minutes to save, and needing Alan to write a script that inserted all the italics into the InDesign file, but all the hard work was definitely worth it now that there’s a real book that’s such a great artifact for a groundbreaking web series.
Thank you so much for reading my blog post about what went into making the Lizzie Bennet Edition of Pride and Prejudice. If you didn’t get a copy through the Kickstarter, I’m not sure if you’ll still be able to purchase one, but keep an eye on my Twitter since I’ll definitely tweet if it shows up on DFTBA. Many thanks to Hank and Bernie for asking me to work on this, and if you have one, I really hope you like it!
