My Story with Sam and Friends, Part III

I was hired by Craig Shemin to work on promotional materials for his new book, Sam and Friends – The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show. Then he brought me on to fine tune the book’s cover. This week I’ll be talking about how it all ended up!

Right off the bat I need to be honest and tell you this post is rather self–serving as I will be gushing about how I got to be involved with some of the promotional events for the book, but I promise I’ll keep the arrogance level low… low–ish. Somewhat modest for sure. You know what? It will have nice pictures if you want to skip reading, deal?

Heading to the Museum of the Moving Image with my family, Sept. 24, 2022

I’ve written about my fan experiences and how the Museum of the Moving Image is kind of a mecca for Muppet fans, so when Craig asked if I would sign the Sam for President posters I created next to him at the book launch on Jim Henson’s birthday, I was ecstatic. For starters, being on the other side of the table was huge. Getting to have moments like meeting Bob McGrath, or chatting with other fans I only knew through Instagram or Twitter @’s was so much fun. I was also grateful to have my wife, daughter, sisters, and my parents all there as well.

Top left: Craig Shemin, bottom left: Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Heather Henson, top right: with Craig and Ryan Dillon, and meeting Bob McGrath

Top left to right: ToughPigs’ Shane Keating and Matthew Soberman, @gollygeemel and the beautiful Dr. Teeth key chain she gave me. Bottom Left to Right:Richard Gomez and the Snerf he built and gave me, Will Carroll, and finally Joe Hennes and Peter Savieri.

Two weeks later, I got to attend New York Comic Con and be on a panel with Craig, Muppet performer Ryan Dillon, and Henson Company Archivist Susie Tofte. Getting to chat with fans, fellow artists, and friends again tops finding any merchandise or rare treasure. It was a real blast and something I will never forget!

Please follow me on Instagram and Twitter and you should also totally buy Sam and Friends – The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show at Bear Manor Media in soft and hard cover.

My Story with Sam and Friends, Part II

I was fortunate enough to be hired by Craig Shemin to create promotional materials for his new book, Sam and Friends The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show. I wrote about it in–depth last week, so please check that out first.

While the work was very exciting and fun, it really was a distant secondary project to the book as the pieces were intended to be handed out at events like the launch at The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Other than that though, I wasn’t expecting any public connection to the book online, and that was fine because just getting to be a small part of Jim’s legacy by distant proxy was satisfying enough for me. However, that all changed a few months later when in July, Craig floated the idea that he would need me to polish up the book’s cover now as well.

On a book like Sam and Friends, there are a checklist of items that have to be met for legal purposes. Craig had created a mock up of the cover understanding it would need to be punched up later, but its main purpose was to get clearance from all the legal sides of The Jim Henson and Walt Disney Companies. However when he approached me about this new addition, there were several things I needed to be brought up to speed on.

The first was obvious, the mock up Craig had created was approved, so I wouldn’t be creating any new concepts. The job was to create a more refined version. Period. The second was a huge surprise to me: there was no high resolution graphic of the Sam and Friends title! This was one of those “seeing behind the curtain” scenarios where I had just assumed the assets were tucked away somewhere in the archives. Now I was responsible for creating that high resolution asset and beyond everything I had done, this felt the most significant to me. I had created something of this asset partially when I designed the campaign poster of Sam that was one of the original promotional items, but now I would fine tune it—purple swirls and all—for future use of the book and whatever else the Jim Henson Legacy saw fit for as well. The third was a later surprise, and that was that Craig’s mock up had been shown and announced back in early 2021 and now I was being announced as the cover artist! My 15 minutes had officially started.

Several color and effect variations of the title

The last thing was something a little more nuanced. The television set used to frame the photograph of Jim, Sam, Kermit, Yorick, and Harry was art Jim Henson himself had created for the show. Unlike the set design style illustrations I had created for the promotional items, or even the Sam and Friends title card, Craig felt the television set art needed to remain Jim’s and therefore would stay intact as is. As a fan, I wholeheartedly agreed. As a graphic designer, this was a massive problem.

NOTE: While this is the actual art of the original TV set, the colored photo of Jim is Photoshopped into the image.

If you’ve ever looked at a digital picture on your phone and just zoomed in as far as you possibly can, eventually you’ll start to see distortion to the image. This is because a digital image is made up of hundreds if not thousands of individual pixels. When you print a digital image, there has to be so many of those pixels crammed into one square inch so that it looks good whereas the numbers of pixels per inch (PPI or DPI–dots per inch) on a screen can be considerably fewer. If an image is too small and you then blow it up/enlarge it, those pixels will be more visible in a ruddy way that will look really bad. It’s a good rule of thumb to enlarge such an image only 130% at most. Anything beyond that will start to show the physical dimensions are of a much lower quality.

Craig had super high resolution scans of almost everything, but for this television set alone to be increased just for the book cover (never mind any promotional uses that would require it even larger), it would need to be blown up 10 times larger which means it would look terrible in print. I suggested letting me recreate the art so that we could avoid every conceivable problem I could think of, but Craig was understandably hesitant. Fortunately, he also trusted me (especially because I told him we could trash it if he wasn’t happy with it), and I digitally painted everything down to the tiniest detail including the speaker and its screen. I also allowed for a humongous bleed area so that the wood grain of the set could easily wrap around the hard cover’s extended borders. Not only was Craig pleased with the result, but now that I had organized every single part into its own unique layer in Photoshop, we could tweak everything for alignment as well as the additional promotional pieces that would come to be, like a standing retractable banner. If that wasn’t helpful enough, my new painting was 200% larger than the necessary size of the cover.

Craig’s mock–up, my illustrated design update, and the Photoshop layers

Fortunately, the scans for the back cover were of a high enough quality that I didn’t need to mess with them too much. Again, having all the high resolution scans from the show weren’t just easier to work with, but very cool to have something I could really look at and enjoy months before the book was published.

The old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is always a thorn in a graphic designer’s side because creating book covers is literally our job. Craig was the perfect client to work for. He was very clear in his directions yet open to my suggestions. I wasn’t just providing him with my ability to create stuff for him but my years of experience as well. I don’t know how much any of those things played into his generous offers to have me join him when he signed copies of his book in Queens or be on the panel at New York Comic Con, but I was about to experience a whirlwind of notoriety and respect and it was super exciting.

The lined area for the dials now extends to the TV frame and the speaker mesh was painstakingly drawn with precision in Adobe Illustrator. The frame was digitally painted with a dry brush texture, the set itself was overlaid with a wood grain texture while the knobs have a felt texture over top.

Tune in next Friday when I share the last and most personal part of this story! Follow me on Instagram and Twitter and thanks for stopping by!

My Story with Sam and Friends, Part I

I’ve been waiting to really break down a huge and wonderful experience I had and today is the day I finally (start to) talk about the work I did for Sam and Friends: The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show. There’s a lot to cover so let’s start with some basics. As I have written about numerous times, I’m a huge fan of Jim Henson and all his creative works. Jim has always been my leading creative influence starting when I was a toddler all the way through to today. When Jim was a kid himself, he was fascinated with television and broke onto the scene with a black and white puppet series in 1955 on WRC–TV in Washington, DC. Craig Shemin—who I’ll also talk a whole lot more about in a bit—took on the huge task of writing a book about this particular introductory foray into Jim’s career, and would eventually bring me on to this fantastic adventure. But let’s slow it down now and get into more detail.

Images from the MuppetWiki

Every true Muppet fan knows who Craig Shemin is, but to the lay person, he’s a massive contributor to preserving the memory and legacy of Jim Henson. At his core, Craig is a writer who has written for television shows like The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, Telling Stories with Tomie dePaola, Donna's Day, and Dog City. He's also written short stories, video game scripts, press interviews & appearances, text for licensed products, concert scripts, and liner notes. He's also hosted live events, screenings, & panels and prepared additional video content for such things. He has a ton of other credits like director, curator, and consultant as well as his current title of president of The Jim Henson Legacy. To say he is incredibly talented is putting it mildly, but he's also genuinely a wonderful person.

Sam and Friends saw the birth of a lot of what would be in store for Jim Henson's future including the unique and newly innovated techniques in puppetry for what would become the Muppets as we know them today. Chief amongst those Muppets would be Kermit the Frog who was only vaguely amphibian at the time. Jim Henson's complete creative collective would be splintered after his untimely death in 1990 with Kermit and his friends from The Muppet Show eventually being purchased by The Walt Disney Company, Sesame Street transitioning full ownership to Sesame Workshop, and things like Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal remaining with the Henson Company. Sam and Friends would become known as a "frozen property" essentially meaning that nothing new can be developed with the characters. I'll expand on that later, but ultimately this is a long and convoluted way of saying that if you really want to know more about Sam and Friends, then you should absolutely buy the book.

So now we come to late April of this year when Craig reached out to me asking if I'd be interested in creating promotional materials for the book. There were a few things I was really excited about for this, but the main draw was that I was being hired to create printed materials that would look like Jim Henson had created them himself. This was huge and I was stoked and honored. Initially I had to create four pieces: a bookplate that Craig could sign at publicity events, a campaign poster that was inspired by a 1960 sketch where Sam ran for president, a sticker, and a bookmark.

Professor Madcliffe's Bookmark

Of all of these, the bookmark was the most ambitious. Professor Madcliffe's Manual Marking Machine for Books would be completely illustrated save for the character himself whom I meticulously but lovingly masked from a 1959 photograph. This was where I set some guidelines for myself from here on out. Because I was drawing every other element aside from the professor, I wanted this particular piece to look like it was actual set design that would have been painted on wood or cardboard much like Jim had done for the actual show. As a result, the pieces that would be further set deeper in the background would be out of focus slightly on camera, so layering everything in Photoshop not only allowed me to move everything freely and easier, but the depth of field was changed as well. A subtle film grain was also added.

I need to quickly add something here that I neglected to before. While Craig was the gatekeeper on what I did, everything had to then be approved by The Jim Henson Company. For the most part that meant just making sure nothing from the show was being used without proper permission from the lawyers, but it also had to meet merit as to how it looked comparatively to what Jim was doing back in the late 50s and early 60s. I've talked about how a committee can complicate this process sometimes but also how scrutinous it can be. Higher–ups tend to need very good visual representation, so early on I was advised to have more fully fleshed out illustrations as opposed to sketches. Again, I've walked down this road thousands of times, so this wasn't a huge ask. Some of the notes that came back though made me tighten up where I found my creative direction.

All the props I created for the bookmark including the rejected ones!

For example, while I used a fantastic (and now out of print) book called Imagination Illustrated by Head Archivist for The Jim Henson Company, Karen Falk for reference, I quickly realized there wasn't quite enough material to re–create Jim's aesthetic without directly plagiarizing it. I found most of my design inspiration from the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The mid century style was fun to create and a style I've enjoyed emulating for quite some time now.

Imagination Illustrated by Karen Falk and screenshots I took from Rocky & Bullwinkle

One of the notes that came back that I appreciated was the push to stray away from things like mechanical gloved hands and wooden signs as they were too reminiscent of the Looney Tunes, whereas Jim used more ornate and flowing designs as opposed to Warner Bros. more industrial style props. I did try and hide a few Easter eggs though. Here they are:

• Professor Madcliffe's "Mirth–Meter" was changed from "Smiles per Second" to "Smiles per Page"

• The wooden board is taken from a sketch where Chicken Liver plays a sheriff from the old west

• A Wilkins Coffee cup (a main commercial entity who sponsored a lot of Jim's work) is obscured just enough to the left of Professor Madcliffe

• The television EKG monitor, tape reals, machine with bulbs on it, and the odd phone looking device are all illustrations of things found from various Madcliffe sketches

• The pickle jar is a reference to the campaign sketch from the Sam for President poster where the character Moldy Hay discovers there's no surplus of pickles

• The red phone is my own tribute to the Muppet Newsman from The Muppet Show

• The intricate round mirror on the back is a recreation of the frame used for their sponsor Esskay Meats

However, the best Easter eggs are the ones Craig created when I requested to label the dials, knobs, switches, and screens (much like Jim did on the show). Almost all of them are obscured, but he wrote so many great ones and then wrote more!

Paper Thickness
Ink Opacity
Avg. Read Speed (WPM)
Page Turn Count
Between the Lines Content
Font Definition
Binding Integrity
Indexing Index
Recycled paper content
Subtext Comprehension
Page Density
Chapter Adapter
Margin Marginalization
Hinge Protector
Colophonograph
Gutter Guard
Comprehension Override
Pulp Friction
Kerning Kompensation
Print Offset Offset
Paper Strength
Appendix Inflammation
Little to Big Word Ratio

Sam for President

The campaign poster seemed like it should be more straightforward and easy, but other campaign posters of the time were relatively bland. In 1960, the notable comparison was that of Kennedy and Nixon. To a modern audience though, it was important that Sam's poster looked nothing like favoring one political party over the other. I had varying degrees of making the poster look aged 60+ years, but the main goal was to reproduce (at least in aesthetic) how it would have looked printed from a 1950s press so I leaned heavily on exploiting its color halftone look.

I didn't realize it at the time, but just creating the "Sam for President" text (to match the Sam and Friends title card) would play a huge role later when I would design the cover, but I'll get more into that next week.

ToughPigs.com editor–in–chief and co–owner Joe Hennes and designer/illustrator extraordinaire Jamie Carroll (who frequently consults on classic Muppet character design for toy companies) became integral to me for notes and critiques. I relied heavily on their input to make sure everything I created here on out looked and felt authentic. When I say none of this stuff was created in a bubble, I genuinely mean it.

Sticker & Bookplate

The last two promotional pieces were the sticker and bookplate. As I mentioned before, Karen Falk's Imagination Illustrated was very helpful, particularly for these two pieces, especially because they really relied heavily on Jim's fanciful and fun, yet intricate border designs. Craig was insistent on having my art credit listed on all of these things primarily so no one thought Jim actually created them. This was one of the most appealing things for me because not only did I share legit credit with my hero, but a few people missed it and thought they actually were drawn by Jim.

Aside from a few non–specific looking creatures that may or may not evoke certain classic characters from all the Muppets, the only true Easter egg was my daughter's (and coincidentally, Craig's grandmother's) name in the first draft of the sticker's border that ultimately was removed.

Ironically, none of this is what I would be known for once the book's official release date was announced and I was then credited as the cover artist! But that's another story for part 2! Tune in next week when I discuss getting the honor to be a much bigger part of the history for Sam and Friends! In the meantime, follow me on Instagram and Twitter and you should also buy the book at Bear Manor Media in soft and hard cover.

Part 2

Part 3