Cookbooks
Dan and Darlene taught and encouraged me so much in this new process to help ensure that my first book would be a success.
They were always available to assist me in this new journey.
Having been encouraged to paint the dishes, I decided to take the deep dive and paint the entire pages, including variegated backgrounds, as well as completely hand-lettered menus. However, when I showed them to my extremely talented Francesca, she recommended that I make the backgrounds a consistent plain cream color. Happily, this was no problem for Dan, who had extensive experience with Adobe Photoshop®. He first extracted the dishes and put them on separate layers. Though he started by adjusting the colors and contrast to obtain black letters on white, this resulted in the hand-drawn letters looking quite jagged. So, then Dan suggested that he could convert my hand-written letters into a computer font.
I was very impressed with how well his custom font emulated the look of my own letters. And I was VERY relieved that I wouldn't have to keep drawing all of the letters. I also realized that the font would allow me to have my office girls help me type in everything for other new cookbooks I planned to make, so that I could concentrate more on just painting the dishes.

Once Dan and Darlene delivered the finished "font-bearing" pages, I realized that Dan was right, and that the pages looked EVEN BETTER than they did with my hand-drawn lettering!
They also had lots of other creative ideas which made me feel like I had partners to throw thoughts to.  They were not only attentive  and on time but truly caring  and excited to work with me.

I have already recommended them to others and can’t wait to start my second book with them!
—Mimi Aiello, author, Mama Mimi's Cook Book
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