Questioner
What is the process for you to create a symbol or map for a book?
Isaac Stewart
Both of those have kind of a different process. If you look at the overview, the process is the same, and it's the same process that a lot of time is used for plotting the book, where you start macro and then go down to the micro level. So, I'll talk about each of those separately.
For a symbol, it's usually Brandon coming to me and saying, "We need a symbol for this series." Or I realize we need a symbol for this series. Let's say the Nalthis one. We just came up with that, we put it on the spine of the Warbreaker leatherbound.
So we said, "We don't have a symbol for Nalthis. What do we want that to be?" And I talked to Brandon, and we said, "Maybe a symbol of the Tears of Edgli." And so, we talk about, "What are the Tears of Edgli? What do we know that's canonical? What do you have in your head?" And we kind of came up with a story about them. And then I just start drawing.
Brandon Sanderson
So, if you don't know what these, the Tears of Edgli are flowers that they get a specific dye for that are briefly mentioned in the books. But they are where the Shardpool is in Warbreaker. So it's actually pretty relevant, although in the first book, it doesn't actually pop up all that much. But they are Invested flowers, basically.
Isaac Stewart
So we thought that would be a good symbol for the world of Nalthis, you take one of its Investitures and make that into a symbol. So I draw a bunch of flowers at this point, and we say, "What looks cool? What is going to be symbolic?" So you can see there's five lobes sticking up, five lobes sticking down. There are references to the number five in this book that have different meanings. Like the Five Scholars, and there was five something else. Anyway. So you'll see that one is sticking up, and one is sticking down. And there's more symbolism in that, as well.
But I do a bunch of symbols, I show them to Brandon, and I say, "Okay, which ones of these do you like? What don't you like?" And then we narrow it down. And then I iterate on that, and I do another version where we get a little bit closer. And once we get it close in the sketch realm, I take it into Illustrator, make some nice vectors so it can print out really well on the foil or as we're doing decals or different things like that.
Another thing that I have in the back of my mind when I'm making is symbols is that I want them to be cool. Because we've noticed (and this was not something I noticed early on), but I noticed people will want to get stickers and put them on their laptops. Or they'll want to get them tattooed. And if somebody's gonna do something permanent like that, I want them to be cool. So that's something that's always in the back of my head, is: "This has got to look cool, in case somebody wants to tattoo it on themselves. I don't want to responsible for something dumb."
