Copyright Disclaimer: under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. My localization of this trailer is a proof-of-concept, and as such does not represent the creators in any way.
Hello, today I’d like to tell you all about my process for localizing the book cover for N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.
Why a book cover?
You might be asking yourself, “Why a book cover?” I’m actually an avid reader, and recently I’ve been reading a different book by N.K. Jemisin. She’s a science fiction writer, and since that’s one of my favorite genres I decided to check out her work. I have yet to read The City We Became, but if it’s anything like her other works I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. I chose this cover in particular because of the work involved in recreating the background, as well as the careful attention I would need to dedicate to font selection.
What went into the project?
There were quite a few steps that went into this project, but I’ll break them down into three broad categories:
- Image Cleanup
- Font Selection
- Adding the Translated Text
With that, let’s take a look at what I did!
Image Cleanup
As you can see in the original JPEG that I uploaded above, there wasn’t a lot of text to clean up. I identified problematic areas and, after creating a picture list, got to work in Adobe Photoshop. After a bit of experimenting, I found that using the Lasso tool to make my selections, the Content Aware tool to create an overlay of the text, and both the Clone Stamp tool and Clone Patch tools to finish the cleanup was the most efficient course of action.
With the Lasso tool, I had to make sure to keep as many of the original pixels unselected. This gave the Content Aware tool more of the original image to work with, and also helped in preventing it from using too many of the unrelated pixels in the image part of the overlay. This is what it would look like if I didn’t follow this process:
So, after the using the Content Aware tool to hide the original text, there’s still some cleanup left to do. Using the Clone Patch tool, I used pixels in a large, nearby area to keep the repeating “bridge underside” look. For areas where I couldn’t do this, the Clone Stamp tool was a good substitute to copy pixels in a smaller area. I used this mainly to help erase any leftover blue or pink from the original text. This is what my cleaned-up background ended up looking like:
Font Selection
I’m not sure how you all might feel about fonts, but I think this was the most challenging aspect of this project. At first glance, I thought any old sans serif font would work fine for the main text in the Spanish version, so I tried out Arial and Myriad Pro. Unfortunately, those fonts didn’t quite have a close enough style that would match the original. On top of that, certain letters had a “pointy” shape to them and finding a font that was a 100% match for the original prove to be incredibly difficult. My workaround? I found a sans serif font that looked close enough to the original and used Adobe Illustrator to alter the letters that needed additional manipulation.
For the cursive text, I used Authenia Regular, a cursive font that looks incredibly similar to the original. In fact, I think it could be the exact font the original designers used!
I used a different method for the author’s name. I couldn’t get the same “look” when using the original font, so what I decided on was to redraw the author’s name by hand on Adobe Illustrator. It was a lot simpler than you would expect, too. All you really need is the Pen tool, and the rest takes care of itself! I’m fairly satisfied with how this came out, although the “S” gave me the most trouble (and could probably still use some editing).
Finally, for the bottom text, I used Diazo MVB Ex Cond Light. I did face a specific challenge with this part of the font selection: this font, while a close match to the original, doesn’t have a direct italic version. To get around this, I needed to split the text into three text boxes: two for the text that didn’t require italics, and one for the New York Times text. To create the illusion of italicized text, I used the Shear tool in Adobe Illustrator. The Shear tool applies its effect to all the text in a text box, so this is why I split up the text into several boxes.
Now, for the Chinese version, the fonts I used for Spanish were no help. I had an easier time with my font selection for this part of the project, since I already had an idea of what I would need. For the main text, I used a font called 等线 (Dengxian). It is a sans serif font and had enough weight to take up space.
For the cursive text, I used Zhi Mang Xing Regular. Although it doesn’t look quite the original, I thought that it was similar enough to use as a replacement.
For the remaining text, I used Adobe 宋体 Std L. I chose fonts that had a lot of weight to make up for the contracted text. I also kept the font the same for these two lines because I had a difficult time finding a similar CCJK font for the bottom, yellow text. This is something I’m a bit displeased with, so in the future I’ll have to spend more time looking for potential fonts! I also couldn’t use the original redraw I did for the author’s name, as I decided to use a transliterated version of her name for the Chinese version.
Adding the Translated Text
This was the easiest part of the project. With all my fonts selected, I simply added my translated text to the image where it needed to go. This seems pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go into too much detail. I used the Type tool to make a big enough text box, adjusted the font size to my liking, and once I was happy with the result, I clicked on Type>Create Outlines to make the text unmodifiable:
This made it easy to create the blue and pink background text. I simply copied the text group, pasted, then used the blue and pink colors from the original image to fill in my next text. Afterwards, I used Ctrl + [ to send the copied text backwards into the image, so that it would appear behind the main yellow text.
The Final Product
Here is the final product, uploaded as a PNG file. What do you all think? Let me know in the comments section!