Book cover: 21st Century American Boys

A short while back, I designed a book cover for Leland Cheuk, an author who is also the publisher of 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses. The book is the novel Soulwaking, and I wrote about the process here. I've designed a number of book covers for his press over the years, and it was such an honor to be asked, out of all the designers he works with, to create the cover for his own novel.

Then recently, he surprised me by saying he has not one, but two books coming out, and would I like to design the cover for his upcoming short story collection 21st Century America Boys? Oh, yes, I definitely would!

21st Century America Boys is being published by the press with the amazing name of Whiskey Tit. They also have a print quarterly and an online journal. Leland worked directly with me on the cover and brought great ideas for the graphics when he reached out to me.

From Leland: "I've always thought that the cover for my first collection was super cool. Since the story collection is named 21ST CENTURY AMERICA BOYS and has stories about dystopian technologies (virtual reality, androids, holograms, app culture, etc.), I was thinking a riff off of that cover with a manchild (t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers) who's also modified with devices. Blindfolded by VR googles, his hands are smartphones, and the lower half of his body is a hologram."

Oh my gosh, yes, I want to make this!

Then he also had the thought, "The other direction I was thinking was just typography - retro (but not too retro) sci-fi fonts. Or the type heavy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow."

I was intrigued with the thought of the retro sci-fi typography direction and loved the Robert A. Heinlein examples he linked to. I actually started tinkering in that direction, the big-type-treatment angle, taking the title and author name into Illustrator and placing it inside the dimensions of the book cover to see where the letters wanted to go.

OK, that was just a quick throw-down of words, nothing I got too far into—because I kept coming back in my head to the idea of the drawing of the man-child with his hologram emergence and his smartphone hands. 

So I left the type treatment alone for the moment and started looking online for images I could use to build my man-child. Photos of t-shirt-and-shorts-wearing guys. Images of cellphones. People wearing VR headsets. As I frankensteined a figure together, I wondered how close I should get to the original Letters from Dinosaurs cover. I didn't want to emulate it too much, but I really liked the stance, the way the dinosaur is standing straight at the bottom but twisting so that, on top, it comes to a three-quarter turn. I started to think of putting my man-child in a posture that to me evoked a mid-century (the last century, that is) superhero. Like Superman, posed straightforward so you can see the S on his chest, but with his head turned, gazing slightly upward. A stance that implies power, which sat with nice irony in my mind alongside the idea of a man-child who's more controlled by his devices than he thinks he is. 

Like the original cover, I wanted to stick with line drawing, which is not my usual style. My process is generally more building than drawing, so it was interesting to think in lines rather than shapes. Then I put together a very simple spray of hologram.

But with that, I couldn't help but want to take my design beyond the lines. To add some dimension of light.

Creating the light was simple: just adding another layer of the same lines, but making those lines thicker and then throwing a blur effect on them. There was more finessing than that, especially in spots where the lines bunched together, but that's generally the idea.

The light in the hologram made my figure's lines want light too, and suddenly my man-child was not only holographic but neon. So everything about him, not just the components of smartphone hands and VR eyes, was built of technology.

My first instinct font-wise was to go with a classic serif because that was the font direction Leland had given me for his novel Soulwaking. But then I started playing around with a couple other fonts that felt good to me visually and conceptually.

One that's used in barcodes, so evoking both technology and commercialism...

And one that to me just looked like straight-up money.

Because what trap is more 21st Century than that?

I was excited that Leland was into the samples I sent him, and together, and then with the publisher, we tried different color options and some layout variations. I really, really wish the idea to make the word stories look like a band name on a band t-shirt was mine, but that stroke of genius came from publisher Miette Gillette.

And the idea to experiment with green and black instead of blue on blue came from Leland: "Thinking about AI these days and command line terminals - really like that blue font, but think the yellow version pops more. I wonder if we went with a black background and white type or black and green to evoke the command line on a terminal."

Ooh, I knew exactly what he meant:

Is it weird that the sight of anything related to cmd.exe can give me the same kind of nostalgia that hearing a popular song from my youth does?

And this exploration gave me what was the most interesting and frustrating part of the process of creating this design. Because black is not just black. At least not in the CMYK color mode, which is the color mode you use when you are creating anything for print. 

These three squares probably look like the same color, yeah?

But each of those blacks is created using a different color as its base. The top black square started out as blue. That blue is a blend of 100% cyan, 100% magenta, and 0% yellow. Leave it at that, and you get the blue square on the left, but take the K slider (which stands for key for some reason) and shift it all the way to 100%, and you get the black square on the right.

The second square down was made with a base of green (75% cyan, 0% magenta, and 100% yellow)

And the third black square started out as pink (0% cyan, 100% magenta, and 0% yellow).

When I took my original design, built on a blue background, and turned that background black, I was confused at first as to why my green hologram light and my pink neon lines looked muddy, until I remembered the weird magic of shapeshifting black.

If I used a blue-black background, my green hologram all but disappeared.

Use a green-black background, and my green hologram came back nice and bright, but look what happened to my pink. The blue strip shows you the difference in how that pink appears against different colors. I loved that blazing pink and wanted to bring it back into the design...

...but create my black with a base of pink, and my green hologram turned muddy again.

Weird, right? I kind of love it, but it made working on Leland's design at that point in the process frustrating, because the background black that worked nicely with one foreground color didn't work nicely with another.

It was a fun puzzle to work out how to get each color to pop like I wanted it to. And I did. But then in the end, after I made and sent more samples to Leland and Miette, the final design they chose was back to blue on blue with neon red. I liked the greens and pinks, but I'm also super happy with the red and blue. It's a design that, I have to admit, every time I see it, makes me instantly and involuntarily happy. 

21st Century America Boys comes out next year. More information on Leland the writer is here, and on Leland the publisher is here, and check out the beautifully droll website of Whiskey Tit here.

For a taste, here's the short story "Office of the Mind" that was published in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading column.

And a short little Q&A that I had with him about 21st Century America Boys and its themes:

Have you always been interested in futuristic themes? Where did it start?

I read a lot of sci-fi growing up—Asimov, Ben Bova, that sort of thing. My first fiction attempt in seventh grade English was a speculative story about a dude named Phylach Jarvik. That's the only thing I remember about it.

But my first collection had a speculative story in it. And in recent years, I've been inspired by the literary speculative work of George Saunders, Charles Yu, Alexander Weinstein, Victor Pelevin, Kate Folk, early Murakami, and others. I thought I'd give it a shot! 

Do you have any favorite books that explore technology and its wonders and its pitfalls?

Children of the New World, stories by Alexander Weinstein, was super inspirational to me, and inspirational to this book. Since I work in tech, I have my own experiences and points of view about new technology that I tried to represent in this collection.

I loved your story "Office of the Mind." It made me curious if you'd had experiences with VR yourself and what you thought of those experiences. 

I have tried the VR for sure. The thing about VR is that no matter how real it seems, it's never as good as reality. I just thought it'd be funny to contrast the horror of the pandemic and sheltering in place with people missing something as ordinary and unspectacular as office life.

Speaking of your story collection Letters from Dinosaurs, how might your writing or style or thematic choices have changed between that collection and this?

As a writer, I consider myself a genre-hopper. I'm always trying to get at something true to lived experience and matter of the heart no matter what genre I'm trying on. Always trying to get at something funny, sad, and absurd all at once. I think with this book and Soulwaking, I'll have done my tour of spec-fic. In my works in progress, I'm working in autobiographical realism. I still want to do a spy novel and a romance. An underrated aspect of writing is having fun with whatever you're doing.