PRISON HATE prison love

A collaboration between Dee and myself

This is a collaborative cap between Dee and myself.  Dee was gracious enough to write up a story to my cap layout "Breaking Out Is Hard To Do".  If you recall, I had a basic idea of a story and worked up an entire layout, design, and even a title, but couldn't get any traction on the story itself.

Dee amazingly enough not only wrote up a story, but made an entire caption out of it:

I'm thoroughly impressed by Dee's ability to take what I had posted here and make a cap out of it. Understand, she did this completely on her own... I didn't pass on the original photo, nor my modified Photoshop file.  If it wasn't for the title in the cap (something I do and Dee doesn't), I wouldn't think that I had anything to do with it, as it looks like a complete Dee cap.

That actually highlights one of the differences in our writing methods.  I tend to write the story out in MS word while looking at the image.  I may have an inkling as to how I'll lay out the text in the photo, but I can't make that decision until I've finished writing.  Dee on the other hand, writes her story IN the cap.  I imagine in this case that Dee took the cap, covered over the place holder text and text box, added a border around the remaining space, added her gradation, and then wrote the story out in the space provided.

Asking either of us to use the other's method of writing would produce vastly different results.  We'd both be fighting our normal habits while trying to harness our creative thoughts into prose.  So while I didn't initially expect a ready made cap from Dee, I should have.  It's how she writes, and it's how she produced this story.

When I got the emailed cap from Dee, I was so impressed with her work that I initially planned on just showcasing her cap.  But she added in her email "I wanted to mark it up in my style, but would love to see what my text would look like in your design too."

So I set out on taking the story she used, and moving it into my layout.  My first thought was to just replace my place holder text with her story.  But where I had four long paragraphs, Dee's story consisted of six far shorter paragraphs.   Here is what it looked like:

Umm... yeah.  That wasn't going to work.  My next thought was to increase the text size to fill the space, but really that would look very similar to Dee's provided cap and it wouldn't really be in my design as I don't ever use that large of text.  So my next move was to increase the text to a size that I would use (in this case, up to 19pt).  Then like I do on my own stories, and have done on other collaborative efforts, edit the text slightly to keep the last line of the paragraphs more even:

I liked the way the text and textbox turned out... but I couldn't leave the cap like this.  There was FAR to much empty space at the bottom of the cap.  Sure, it highlighted the model's legs, but as that wasn't part of the story I didn't see any reason to highlight them.  I thought about just moving down the text box and text to the center of the image.... but that had problems as well.  The white sky above the story was just as powerful of an empty space as the model's legs below.  So I figured moving the title over that spot and lining up the text box with that would work:

It worked fairly well.  I could always tweak the size of the title to take up more space, but I still had the empty space to the right of the model to deal with.  As that space adding nothing to the story or the cap, I figured that there was no reason to keep it at all.  And as long as I was cropping, I could crop out some extra space above and below the model.  I readjusted the position of the title and story, added my watermark, and was just about ready to publish it:

The only thing stopping me from publishing the cap was the title.  It really had nothing to do with Dee's story.  Our subject wasn't even really 'breaking out' of prison.  So I worked at a new title that would deal specifically with Dee's story.  And since we had one person who hated the idea of going to prison, one person who wouldn't mind going to prison, and one person who was now going to hate prison all that much more.... Prison Hate Prison Love seemed like a good title.  I still liked the alternating colors so I kept that design feature, and just changed the text size to match up (making the second line be the same width as the text box below it.

And voila!  A collaborative cap between Dee and myself.

I of course think Dee's story is great and don't think my edits did to much harm to it.  But as always with a collaborative effort, I won't be satisfied until Dee says she is satisfied.