Our bookmaking starts with a question. What stories are meant to be told with more sensory depth? We don’t even care if it’s a story that’s been told thousands of times over thousands of years – has it been told with expressions built for multiple senses?
Think about it. How many times have you read a book and thought, "I wish I could see or hear this"? I wish I wasn’t just imagining it.
We pursue topics that:
- We believe need a screenless version but words alone limit the potential of the story’s impact and intrigue
- Have been visualized in print, but there's a hidden angle waiting to be explored across artistic disciplines
- Are new story ideas ripe for inventive publishing
Once we have a story topic, we attempt to become architects of understanding with pieces of wonder. We build storyboards that are more than just sequences of images.
They're blueprints of entertainment.
Each storyboard is a delicate balance of annotations with standards like:
- Highly captivating, provocative visuals
- Text that illuminates but won’t distract or be ignored due to density
- Audio that blends and thoughtfully transitions
Who owns this creative process? Sometimes, Radioposter finds the artist before we even have an idea and gives them the space to imagine and storyboard with us as a lead. Other times, the artist emerges from our own internal storyboard and we find the right match.
But always, always, the artist is the critical ingredient.
Think of it like an animation team, but for printed material. There’s always a storyteller but the artist adds the matter – the substance that makes it something worth sitting with. There’s an iterative art to blend story, page cadence, audio accompanient, and visuals in a way that will captivate an audience that won’t be isolated in a theater. They’re just sitting somewhere they find comfortable for reading – that could be inside on a plushy chair, outside at a park or in between at a coffee shop under an awning as light rain falls around them. Something we always challenge ourselves to care deeply about is textures and material. Cover elements, paper weight, binding type, ink types — they all makeup an important part of the sensory experience that Radioposter promises. We leave plenty of space for experimental applications in this department and every so often take over the bookmaking on-site because what we’re hoping to do isn’t possible with traditional printing methods & build. There’s also an art here to balancing the cost of production and ensuring our target reader for this story is willing and able to afford it. Some stories are built to be printed a few hundred times, others millions.
Eventually the book is printed and the app is updated with added audio textures. The real test comes when the story meets its audience. We test every story with the spectrum of super fans to skeptics and this is critical to us meeting our own quality standards but also preparing for what people may say when it meets the wild. Attention is the scarcest resource so we’re mostly looking for moments where it breaks for better or worse – boredom, moments of awe, and general distraction that’s created from our story or the world.
Once a story is for sale and out in the world – it’s no longer ours but we do take responsibility for any negative feedback or newfound information that may change facts or perspectives. We’ll take accountability and make changes for future prints, if necessary. We celebrate each launch with the artists involved and spend a day appreciating the spider web that was the creative process.
Then it’s back to the drawing and soundboard.