To illustrate the concept of "New Century, New Connections" for the Metropolitan Planning Council's 2000 Annual Report, Kate Friedman Design' s Laurie Sherman hit upon the idea of superimposing communications cables over a highway interchange. The highway cloverleaf would divide the cover page into four sections which could then be used to show the various types of land use categories the Council deals with. Working from a rough composite sketch and using stock photography for the four background images, this complex image was created as follows:
First the highway image was output as a large inkjet print and attached to a foam core board to act as a template for the positioning of the cables. By photographing the cables and connectors directly above the image, they could be exactly arranged to coincide with the sweeping curves of the ramps and give a clear indication of how the three-dimensional parts would interact with the rest of the image. Once the cables had been curved and suspended in place, they were photographed on 4x5 color transparencies and the film hi-res drum scanned.
The scan was imported into the studio workstation and all the cables were hand-outlined for removal and placement onto the scan of the highway interchange image. Now the stock photography of the urban area, the rural area and the housing stock were brought in as scans (mostly in black and white). They were carefully reshaped to accomodate the needs of the layout (including extending the downtown skyline several inches to the right to replace a distracting building), and converted into simulated duotones employing gradient ink colors and black. The upper right quadrant was retouched to remove buildings and parking lots visible in the aerial shot and replace them with forest.
What followed then was an extended process of blending and shading the four stock images, the cable images, shadows and glows to create various versions of the page. Lowres versions would be emailed to Kate Friedman Design for review by Laurie and Kate and the client, and the cover image took shape over period of about a week. The final file was shipped on CD as a CMYK tiff, along with a master file containing all layers, alpha channels and alternate versions. (The master file weighed in at 265MB.)