To illustrate the concept of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) transforming itself into an enabler of multimedia services, Global Telephony magazine's new art director Sheila Tawney imagined a butterfly being released from a human hand. The simple, elegant visual was created with only three props: A butterfly specimen, a translucent phone cable and Ms. Tawney's left hand.
First, we photographed the hand in a variety of poses, draped with the supple phone cable and lit to work with the pure white background preferred for Global's covers since 1999. Once we had this on film, the task of making a mounted butterfly specimen take flight was accomplished by dismantling the wings and reassembling them into the ninety degree dihedral of the creature in flight. This was done very delicately with Xacto knife and hot glue. The resulting assembly was then photographed with identical lighting.
The films were then scanned and imported into the studio workstation for retouching and assembly. The trickiest problem involved creating the VOIP lettering on the wings to look like natural markings yet remain legible. The hand-drawn letterforms were curved and feathered slightly to match the existing wing patterns and the butterfly was given a deep blue color. (The original was pale brown). This was then placed into the master chassis file with the hand and given blur ghosts for added motion.
The final assembly was delivered to Ms. Tawney as a CMYK Photoshop file with the butterly and hand layers intact, allowing for repositioning to accomodate type.