Book covers

Done with the book workshop! yay! We got very good feedback though. My teammates and I went out for a celebratory pizza dinner last night. We worked pretty well together, but I don't think we're going to end up best friends-- last week there was just too much tension and too little sleep. Dinner was a quiet event.

I'm glad to be done. Designing book jackets sounds more glamorous than it was-- I spent most of my time googling for images and resizing things and downloading fonts with names like Bleeding Cowboy. It was hard to compete with the more experienced designers, although they all helped me out with the design programs. Everyone was very collaborative. We also had two adult supervisors who gave us advice and and tried to keep us in line (but I was bitter because neither of them knew anything about InDesign or Photoshop). One of the supervisors advised me to lay off the Bleeding Cowboy and try a much simpler typeface like Gil Sans. Then she started reminiscing. "I love Gil Sans. It's good for everything. We used to ask each other, 'If you could only take two fonts on a desert island, which would they be?' And I would always choose Gil Sans. It's plain, but so elegant."

Now, a retrospective of the book covers I made last week:

The first was Adobe: Authentic Techniques, Modern Designs. I really wanted to call it Adobe! but no one listened to me. This cover was relatively easy to make and turned out well despite the fact that I had no design skills yet. I spent half the day watching InDesign tutorial videos and the rest of the day browsing flickr for photos of adobe.


That's a picture of the Santa Fe opera house.

After that I was feeling really ambitious. I decided to go all out for The Forager's Guide to the Southwest. I made five different versions of this cover, but the only one I have in pdf form is the final version. It's okay, the others weren't very good.



Note the Alaskan fireweed and Mt. McKinley in the background.

The next book, The Prejudiced Brain, was touch and go for a while. My teammates tried to wrest away my design authority after Sessalee Hensley dismissed my cover with a single word: "dullsville." Dullsville! Sessalee is the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, and everyone in the publishing world speaks of her in mixed tones of resentment and envy. Before meeting her, I pictured her as a literary Anna Wintour, but she actually looks more like a big blonde public librarian. We met with her to "sell" three of our books. Sessalee told us The Prejudiced Brain was right up her alley, that she would read it in a heartbeat, but that the cover was...you know. That was the version I posted last week. (Joanne, you were right, it needed work.)

Then my teammates tried to commission another guy from our group to design the cover. He made it in 3 hours and my team loved it. It was a picture of a guy in a museum, looking at three framed pictures: an astronaut, a housewife, and a dumpster. I was irritated... I continued making changes to my own cover:



See, much more fun! (And that font is Gil Sans.)

My final cover was for a book called States of the West: Four Perspectives on the Identity of a Region. It was a book of essays about the new American West. Boring title. "Can we change it, please?" I asked my group, and got back a short email from one of the editors. "I actually like the title," she wrote. "We put a lot of thought into it. The double entendre of 'states' is nice, and it's clear and concise." Okay, fine. She got her title, I got my brain cover.


That's it. Next week: magazine workshop. I don't think I want to go into magazine publishing. From what I've heard so far, it sounds like a grind.