For my bouncing ball, I did some research. Was a basketball in the late 1930s the same as a basketball now? Those particular markings they have? I found not only some old photographs but a patent illustration from June 25, 1929. I pulled it all into Illustrator for good measure so I could work off of something real and historic for my simple Red Heads basketball.
Back in the day, they were leather and brown or tan rather than the bright orange rubber we see nowadays. The one thing that caught my eye, the one thing that might be an issue, is the stitching you see in the bottom of the above screenshot. I worried a little that if I needed to include that detail, it could potentially not read instantly as a basketball to modern readers, and may be one detail too many alongside my very simplified America and bouncing path. Then I found out that just before the time period in which the story takes place, the lace-up detail stopped being a thing. Being the nerd I am, I liked building my basketball off of a photograph of an actual vintage ball of the time.
For the lettering, I instantly wanted to use the tall angular serif that's often used for sports and colleges. As I poked around on the Internet looking at pictures of Depression-era sports jerseys and advertisements, I saw it a lot. It felt like an authentic choice to make. I found a font called, fittingly, Graduate that looked good, but for the look I wanted, and to fill the space of my layout the best, I needed it to be taller.
You can stretch the words and make them taller, but then the lines aren't all of consistent thickness. So instead, I typed out and placed my title and author name and then turned the text into outlines, so that instead of being editable text, it was shapes. Then I could cut and elongate the letters.
For colors, it felt fitting to use a background red for a book called The Red Heads as well as a blue-on-blue map for America. Keeping my red a darkened shade, and my blue bright, plus the eventual third color of my basketball, I figured would help evoke a feeling of old America, as opposed to an on-the-nose flag-waving modern America.
I wanted a little something more for my type treatment, so for the word The in the title, I looked at fonts that were of a vintage style to pair with my sports font. I turned that text, too, into outlines so that I could tinker with it.
And it worked well for a novel, with, again, some tinkering.
Finally my bouncing ball. I grabbed a map and plotted out the various spots in the country where Rachel was interested in the ball touching down.
Then I experimented until I found a trajectory for my path that both looked good and satisfied the rundown of landmarks Rachel wanted to highlight.
Also doing a touch of color finessing along the way.
I liked that Rachel didn't want just a random bouncing ball but a path created from the true landmarks of the stories in her book.
We experimented with some texture and color options (trying for sepia or a a red/sepia combo)...
...but throughout the process, the story of this book cover (and for me each book cover has a story) was of naturalness. A lot of designs are a struggle. A puzzle to figure out. Not that I don't enjoy the work of it. The design for The Red Heads unspooled very naturally for me somehow. The layout, the fonts, the original colorway. It all felt almost instinctive. And in the end, after I'd moved one bouncy spot from southeast to southwest Missouri (which necessitated a shift in the final line of the basketball bounce), we had our final cover—well, with some empty space on top waiting for a blurb, which we'll add when the time comes.
The Red Heads comes out in June of 2027. More information on Rachel is here, and info on Forest Avenue Press is here.
And here's an excerpt:
In the years I was growing up in Oregon City after the Great War, the death of my parents meant ignorance and caretaking, and little else. Not at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I left my hometown at age nineteen that I attained an awareness of myself and the world—that I set out on a kind of journey.
My parents died in a car crash in 1924, when I was six years old and my little sister, Carrie, was barely one. My aunt and uncle—my mom’s sister and her husband—took us in and raised us fine, but the Depression hit them hard, and by the mid-1930s they were renting out every bedroom except Carrie’s and mine. They themselves slept on a mattress in the walk-in pantry off the kitchen, and their two sons were off with the Civilian Conservation Corps. To pay them room and board, during my last year of high school, I found a job backstage at a burlesque show in Portland, an assignment I liked better than sitting in class.
To get to work, I walked into downtown Oregon City to the streetcar, which took me the fifteen miles into downtown Portland. At the theatre before the show, I darned costumes and did the dancers’ makeup. During the performance, I helped the women change during or between numbers and prompted them on and offstage at the correct times. Afterward, I washed costumes and cleaned the stage, usually finishing work around 2 a.m. I enjoyed the streetcar ride and the walk home on clear and cool nights, but on cold, wet nights I was exhausted by the time I got into bed.
In the winter of 1937, after a month of rain, I came down with a cough and fever and missed three days of work. My boss, George, said that if it happened again he’d fire me. Although talkative with many dancers, George spoke to me only to point out a spot I’d missed when mopping or to ask me to run an errand. He’d hired me on the recommendation of a high school classmate, a burlesque dancer named Julia, maybe thinking I was as raucous as she was. But I rarely made mistakes, and since such meticulous employees could be hard to find, I thought he’d probably keep me on, until one day, in the summer of 1937, after I’d worked there for a little over a year, when he asked me to become a dancer.
I was leaning against the red curtains, watching the women onstage. They wore purple sequined caps; their heads glittered as they twirled. George came up close to me and with two fingers followed a strand of loose hair hanging over my face. Repelled, I pulled my head away, then continued to gaze onstage. He told me that Natalie was pregnant, and that in three months, he’d need to hire another dancer. He asked whether I was interested.
I remembered when Natalie had missed her time, how I’d redone her makeup after she cried. I did not want to dance. I was not flexible or great with rhythm; I’d make a fool of myself. But if I turned George down, he might fire me. I told him that I’d let him know before Natalie left, then on my days off began to search for a new job, without luck, like most everyone else.
