You know when you finish designing a book cover and the author loves it and the publisher loves it and people say lovely things and you're feeling so happy?
Well, this particular happiness doesn't always make it to production, and sometimes, even long after advance readers have been printed and images have gone up on websites and the book has started to gain an identity alongside the design, you find yourself back at ye olde drawing board.
Forest Avenue Press' upcoming book This Particular Happiness is a memoir about writer Jackie Shannon Hollis' experience navigating the decision not to have children. Our original cover was designed to reflect the beauty of Jackie's writing and the complexity of the decision she made—the love, the sacrifice, the loss. These are all things that make the book wonderfully compelling, but there are many ways to market a book, and for promotional purposes, our distributor, Publishers Group West, was interested in focusing on another aspect of her story: empowerment.
And for that, we knew we would need a cover with an entirely different tone.
It was late in the game when we decided to reimagine the design. Panic! How could I possibly totally reconceptualize and redesign at this late date—especially when coming up with the original took soooo long (It really did. I wrote about it here.)?
But then a bit of inspiration hit me, and in the course of two weekends, I had a completely finished idea.
The subtitle to Jackie's book is "a childless love story." In my brainstorming, I started thinking about how the book is a story of a partnership, not just one person's experience. I pictured a vista, lots of sky, sunrise or sunset colors, and in the foreground, two clasped hands (representing Jackie and her husband Bill) with the subtitle "a childless love story" written in a swoop right across their arms. Putting both childless and love story right there on their connected bodies, and letting that subtitle cradle the sky and the words of the title: This Particular Happiness. The lettering would be hand-done. The kind of lettering that is dynamic, alive.
I liked this. I started to make this.
Of course, nothing is as easy as you picture it in your head. And that's one of the things about me. As much as I'm obsessed with working with visual arts, I don't have a good visual mind. I don't see things. When I picture something, it's generally in the form of a concept, and I don't know what it will look like until I make it and can actually see it.
I couldn't make the thing with the arms work. It was the crux of my idea, and I couldn't make it work.
Arms were, it turned out, way thinner than they should be, at least for adequately writing on.
I wanted the arms/clasped hands to be a silhouette so that the words stood out, but then they just looked like a shape. A stretched out blob. I added a sleeve to make it more obvious. Some bracelets. Was Jackie a bracelet-wearing type of person? The words looked crowded.
I zoomed in a bit to give the lettering some room.
Now it looked even more like a blob.
I tried moving the lettering out from inside the clasped hands/arms and letting it lie in a swoop above. The hands were now an empty elongated blob.
I zoomed way out.
It was more obvious that these were two people holding hands, but by now I'd started to wonder whether the clasped hands were necessary at all.
For me, a lot of design work (mine, I mean) isn't so much creativity as discovery. I think about different types of artists: the painter, the sculptor, the print maker... There's also what's called a "found object" artist. Someone who finds objects and turns them into art. Discovering the art piece as they go. Sometimes I think of myself as a "found object" designer. Like in the sample above: taking the swoop of a childless love story and breaking it apart and on impulse layering the two halves sort of equally off balance—suddenly there was an element I hadn't had before. That off-kilter a childless love story felt like a discovery. And it felt so right that I realized the clasped hands below it were just in the way.
A couple of weekends of tinkering and discovering, pairing things down, and then a bit of follow-up time, consulting with publisher Laura Stanfill and writer Jackie Shannon Hollis on little things like the placement of the blurb, and we had our cover.
Interestingly, to me this new cover feels kind of effortless whereas the earlier cover felt... beautiful but full of effort, somehow. As if, looking at the design, you can see all the work it took to fashion that flower from words, how difficult it was to create matching petals out of words of such different sizes. Aunt. Counselor. Friend.
I learn something every time I design a book cover. (I probably learn some of the same things over and over, but that's my brain.) What I learned with This Particular Happiness is to remember you don't always have to be super literal. All those words, those bits of information I was squeezing into that flower. And the time I labored to get those clasped hands right. Sometimes, what you need is simply the right tone, the right mood. The right feel.
When I look at the early attempts at this current cover design, with the subtitle written across the arms (the only thing that came from my first bit of inspiration) I see a heaviness in the bottom half. The top half feels light, alive. Once I got out of my own way and let the piece feel right, I knew I'd done my job.
This Particular Happiness launches this fall. More info is here.
Here's a tiny taste:
She was in the kitchen and I burst out my news. Her eyes went big. She moved in toward me, already shaking her head. “Oh no,” she said. Her voice was fierce. “That’s not ladylike. Girls are supposed to let the boys win. Make them feel strong. Otherwise they won’t like you.”
And for that, we knew we would need a cover with an entirely different tone.
It was late in the game when we decided to reimagine the design. Panic! How could I possibly totally reconceptualize and redesign at this late date—especially when coming up with the original took soooo long (It really did. I wrote about it here.)?
But then a bit of inspiration hit me, and in the course of two weekends, I had a completely finished idea.
The subtitle to Jackie's book is "a childless love story." In my brainstorming, I started thinking about how the book is a story of a partnership, not just one person's experience. I pictured a vista, lots of sky, sunrise or sunset colors, and in the foreground, two clasped hands (representing Jackie and her husband Bill) with the subtitle "a childless love story" written in a swoop right across their arms. Putting both childless and love story right there on their connected bodies, and letting that subtitle cradle the sky and the words of the title: This Particular Happiness. The lettering would be hand-done. The kind of lettering that is dynamic, alive.
I liked this. I started to make this.
Of course, nothing is as easy as you picture it in your head. And that's one of the things about me. As much as I'm obsessed with working with visual arts, I don't have a good visual mind. I don't see things. When I picture something, it's generally in the form of a concept, and I don't know what it will look like until I make it and can actually see it.
I couldn't make the thing with the arms work. It was the crux of my idea, and I couldn't make it work.
Arms were, it turned out, way thinner than they should be, at least for adequately writing on.
I wanted the arms/clasped hands to be a silhouette so that the words stood out, but then they just looked like a shape. A stretched out blob. I added a sleeve to make it more obvious. Some bracelets. Was Jackie a bracelet-wearing type of person? The words looked crowded.
I zoomed in a bit to give the lettering some room.
Now it looked even more like a blob.
I tried moving the lettering out from inside the clasped hands/arms and letting it lie in a swoop above. The hands were now an empty elongated blob.
I zoomed way out.
It was more obvious that these were two people holding hands, but by now I'd started to wonder whether the clasped hands were necessary at all.
For me, a lot of design work (mine, I mean) isn't so much creativity as discovery. I think about different types of artists: the painter, the sculptor, the print maker... There's also what's called a "found object" artist. Someone who finds objects and turns them into art. Discovering the art piece as they go. Sometimes I think of myself as a "found object" designer. Like in the sample above: taking the swoop of a childless love story and breaking it apart and on impulse layering the two halves sort of equally off balance—suddenly there was an element I hadn't had before. That off-kilter a childless love story felt like a discovery. And it felt so right that I realized the clasped hands below it were just in the way.
A couple of weekends of tinkering and discovering, pairing things down, and then a bit of follow-up time, consulting with publisher Laura Stanfill and writer Jackie Shannon Hollis on little things like the placement of the blurb, and we had our cover.
Interestingly, to me this new cover feels kind of effortless whereas the earlier cover felt... beautiful but full of effort, somehow. As if, looking at the design, you can see all the work it took to fashion that flower from words, how difficult it was to create matching petals out of words of such different sizes. Aunt. Counselor. Friend.
I learn something every time I design a book cover. (I probably learn some of the same things over and over, but that's my brain.) What I learned with This Particular Happiness is to remember you don't always have to be super literal. All those words, those bits of information I was squeezing into that flower. And the time I labored to get those clasped hands right. Sometimes, what you need is simply the right tone, the right mood. The right feel.
When I look at the early attempts at this current cover design, with the subtitle written across the arms (the only thing that came from my first bit of inspiration) I see a heaviness in the bottom half. The top half feels light, alive. Once I got out of my own way and let the piece feel right, I knew I'd done my job.
This Particular Happiness launches this fall. More info is here.
Here's a tiny taste:
She was in the kitchen and I burst out my news. Her eyes went big. She moved in toward me, already shaking her head. “Oh no,” she said. Her voice was fierce. “That’s not ladylike. Girls are supposed to let the boys win. Make them feel strong. Otherwise they won’t like you.”
I’d always felt close to her when she taught us things about being a lady, how to sit with our ankles crossed and our hands folded in our laps, how to say please and thank you and always offer to help with the dishes when we were guests, how to squat, not bend, when wearing a dress. But this didn’t make any sense. To pretend would be a lie. Wasn’t being strong part of being a lady too?
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