Wednesday, June 13, 2012




Author Blog Challenge # 12

Describe your process for choosing and designing your book cover. Who created your cover? How did you find him/her? What do you love about your cover? What might you do differently next time?

I designed the cover for The Hidden Risks. I had studied design and layout as one of my diploma subjects so had some understanding of where to begin – and hopefully end. I wanted the cover to hold the essence of what a book is about, not always an easy task to condense a book of a hundred plus pages down to a single image. Whether fiction or non-fiction, it is essential to find a core image or artwork-that best represents the book.

As this book spanned five generations, I chose images from each era and photoshopped these into a single sepia toned image, each blurring into the next.  Choose a good font for the title and author name. Slight variations in lettering can convey a much different meaning. Elegant script lettering for a science fiction novel might be entirely inappropriate, or else this skewing of expectations could be very effective.

While the use of at least four colours (with six recommended) is suggested, I decided on just two colour – blue over sepia. I can’t remember now why I did this, but I obviously thought it was the way to go at the time. It may have been I thought the sepia would give the reader a sense of times past or a merging of times. Wanting to use a font and spacing that was easy to read, I decided on Times New Roman for both title and sub title, as uncommon or distracting styles of text tend to distract many readers.


As this book was spiral bound I didn’t need to think about spine design.

I included a brief plot summary in a bordered text box on the back cover of the book, with a lot of white space for greater impact. There is nothing I love about the cover although I was quite pleased with it at the time.

I am currently revising this book, to incorporate it into a much larger family history, so a new cover will be required – and probably a new title. The cover will have a different treatment to reflect the change in contents. I intend to find a single piece of artwork that best sums up the essence of the story, which will be in full colour front and back, and perfect bound.

~ Merlene Fawdry


1 comment:

  1. That's a huge task, you're right. Best of luck on the new design! Interesting that you took some design courses :) WRITE ON!

    ReplyDelete

For some reason I'm yet to fathom I'm unable to reply to comments left by others so thank you for dropping by and taking the time to read and comment. Merlene