Highland Wildlife Park Guidebook
I found one of my old Sketch books from 1995 today
In it was it this simple little illustration of a Capercaillie and it got me thinking of my very first charity sector job.
A guidebook for the Highland Wildlife Park, (HWP)
This little sketch, among other things, ended up in a guidebook I created for them and though it is not much to look at by today’s standards, it won an award for the best holiday attraction guidebook in Scotland.
It all started with a holiday visit to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) HWP where I was handed a very shoddy “100th” generation photocopy for a guidebook. While I did think that perhaps as a registered charity they might have better things to spend money on than my guidebook I had just handed over a not unsubstantial amount of money to visit the park and expected a little more for my money.
I decided that, instead of complaining, it might be better to try and help out. So, on my return to the studio I looked to see what could be done. Working on the assumption that printing was beyond their current budget I set about creating a design with more contrast that would photocopy well. With the artwork ready for a 12 pp guidebook I sent them a high quality reproduction master designed specifically to give good results when used on a photocopy machine.
The Park Manager was so pleased with this that when it came to designing a new guidebook they asked if I would step in and design a whole new guidebook for the park.
With the PhotoShop we have today I can hardly believe how much things have changed and the amount of photo manipulation work I had to put into this publications very simple front cover cover.
Back then Adobe was yet to buy Aldus and develop Aldus PhotoStyler into the Adobe PhotoShop we know and love today.
I was given the photograph of the roaring stag by the HWP and of course their logo depicting Przewalski’s Horse a European Bison and Red Deer. The education and conservation thinking behind the Parks collection of animals was natures history in Scotland with animals that were or still are indigenous to the Scottish Highlands.
As some of the species were pre historic I decided to montage the HWP logo with another image, a wall of natural sandstone in Jesmond Dene (I shot specifically for this) to give the impression of a cave painting before finally montaging the resulting image with that of the stag.
While much of this was simple with some of the transparency tools available, not having layers, a good cut tool and a decent amount of computing power (despite having 4 processors when everyone else only had one) made it all very difficult and time consuming.
Having no layers meant me saving every single version I created along with every intermediate version I made along the way because once you had saved it that was it. As artwork it was flattened and nothing could be moved or changed without opening the previous version. On top of all this there was the colour balance and lighting from three images to consider and match up to make it look like they all had the same original light source.
I’m sure I remember this taking the best part of a week or maybe more (the dye sub print output alone would take all night to print one photographic quality A4 on a £6k printer). Today the whole thing would take me just a few hours not days. That said the work can’t be too bad as I’m still very happy to put my name to it.
