Book Cover: To Jones

I lobbied for this one. 

Generally book cover jobs come to me, not the other way around, but when I found out my friend, writer Shannon Brazil, had signed a contract with Limit Zero for her novel To Jones, a book that I have known and loved for years as she wrote and rewrote and edited it in our writing group The Gong Show,  I knew I just had had had to design its cover.

To Jones is a beautifully written, funny, emotional, very sexy novel. The official publisher description says it best:

Sex-starved wife and overwhelmed mother, Joanna O’Malley, a.k.a. Jones, sets out on a solo road trip with a one-time hall pass to have sex outside of her marriage. From Portland, through the spectacular Oregon Outback, to Black Rock City, Nevada, the largest temporary art community in the world, comes a story of personal revolution, aftermath, and the long-term dynamics that can keep a couple together or tear them apart.

To Jones is a love song wrapped in a reckoning; an exploration of expectation versus reality, sacrifice versus compromise, anger versus compassion, and suffocation versus resuscitation. It is about everyday people coming to terms with who they are to one another and choosing whether it is better to live by societal constructs or redefine the terms of their marriage. One size does not fit all.

I was overjoyed when the publisher said I could have the job. And I loved the design concept they and Shannon had been discussing: the silhouette of a female body, its shape filled with the vista of a desert road. The concept felt quite sexy. The body, yes, but also the way the shape would interact with the landscape that filled it. I could already see in my mind the road's center line delineating the legs. I already knew how I could make good use of the positioning of the sun.

I should pause here and mention a couple things. First, when I was signed on to design To Jones, it didn't even quite have a title yet. It was probably going to be called To Jones, but there was also some back-and-forth with an alternate title, Jones Burning. Fire and flame are meaningful metaphors in the book, and in fact even if no whiff of burn got into the title, Limit Zero was interested in me experimenting with finding a place in the cover art to add a flame or fire. So that was another element for me to keep in mind as I experimented.

And another thing I needed to keep in mind was the branding of publisher Limit Zero. All LZ books have the title and author name in the same spot, in the same font, in the same size. It creates a framing to imagine that art in and around. 

By the way, there's some mystery around the publisher of Limit Zero. They keep their identity under wraps. You can read about that on their website here. For the purposes of my post, when talking about the back and forth I had with them during the design process, I'll just call them Limit Zero or LZ.

As I got started, I had two main tasks. One: build a desert road. Figure out my landscape, my elements (the road lines, the scrub, the mountains, the sky), decide how color and shape would best fit inside the silhouette of the body. Two: create the body. The right body, that would best fill the dimensions of the book, sit well with the Limit Zero text branding, and pair best with my desert road.

To create my vista, I Google-Earthed the area where the road trip takes place in the book. There are lots of different types of deserts, and I wanted to honor the story's desert with the details I created. Then I went into Illustrator and started to draw my scene. 

I also thought a lot about color. My landscape was going to be layers of color, and I needed those layers to balance so that I didn't have one section standing out from the rest in a way it shouldn't. Color can sometimes be quite a puzzle to work out in a design. I played with reds, pinks, purples. Sunrise/sunset colors, to go logically with where I wanted the sun in the sky—not to mention how evocative those colors are. But I also thought about desert mid-day colors, hot and dusty. Maybe I could experiment with putting the sun higher, depending on the body or bodies I came up with.

For the body, I figured I'd experiment with some different figures to see what worked best with the desert road. I Googled around to find a few photos I could draw my body shape from.

I'm always surprised at how difficult it can be to do an image search and find what you want. And I wasn't limited by copyright or model releases or anything for this project. I wasn't going to reproduce a photograph or even create art using the features of a photograph. I could use any image I found, to base my silhouette on. Even then, with a universe of bodies at my fingertips (sounds dirty), it still took a while. 

I drew out some silhouettes, from simple torso to fuller body.

One of the big issues was arms. I could find a photo I liked of a woman in a position I liked, but turn it into a silhouette, and the arms looked blobby and undefined. Or even if the silhouette looked nice, no matter what position the arms were in, they tended to distract from the vista and the road. 

I created a layout where I liked the figure and a lot of how it interacted with the landscape, but bits of the road turned her hands into inexplicable half gloves.

I tried lifting the arms and I liked the sense of movement and energy in that, but it left a question of what the body was doing and why.

As I experimented, I found that my favorite silhouette was the simplest. Just a torso, starting on top at the edge of the breasts and running down the page, over the curve of the hips, tapering down into the legs, and stopping there. This iteration of the body/road combo felt sly. I liked how the shape became abstract. Is it a body or is it not? Is it a vase? At times, especially when I played with a dark color for the background, it felt like looking through a keyhole. It was what was inside—the lines of the road, the placement of the sun—that defined the body.

I was really zeroing in on reds as the colorway, allowing that sun to blaze. Remembering Limit Zero's request that I include an element of fire or flame, I went one step further.

It was becoming a little on the nose, but I liked the way the tiny flame licking up from the sun seemed to define a navel.

Feeling adventurous with my play at innuendo, I went even one step further.

I gathered up these latest three, alongside a set with yellow backgrounds, and sent them off to LZ for a look. They liked the torso-no-flame version and came back with suggestions for variations. They were interested in seeing what the design would look like with a black background. In pinks and purples. With different font colors. With a risograph texture.

I guess you can't see the texture in the above. Here are a few details.

Can you even really see the texture there? Ah well, this old blog. 

It was fun in particular to experiment with the riso look, something I'd never tried before. In the end Limit Zero and Shannon chose the simpler version, no texture, in the original reds. I was happy with that choice. I liked the pink-purple-blue combo that was in the running when they'd narrowed their choices down to three, but I liked the reds best because the sun in the center just blazes, which feels most fitting with the burn of emotion and sexuality throughout the book. 

To Jones comes out in March of 2027. More info on Shannon is here, and you have to check out the cool website for Limit Zero here. And for a little taste, here's an excerpt!

*

That last descending stretch of Route 26 before it broke from Mount Hood and onto the wide-open high desert of Oregon was windows down, music loud. And I’ll confess something else right now, only because it was a total shuffle-coincidence, but the first song I heard on the other side of the mountain was “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael. And I have to tell you, with the horizon in front of me, the sun in the sky, the wind in my hair, it was the perfect song, the only song. A childhood anthem that choked me up in spite of myself. 

Because everything that needed to come loose in me, my shoulders, my wrists, the giant ball sockets of my hips, broke free during that song. I pulled out the ponytail, shook my hair free. Right hand on the wheel, left hand out the window, fingers spread wide. I yelled into the wind, to the heavens above. 

“Thank you, George Michael!” 

If it was a midlife crisis I was having, this was the moment I decided to own my shit.

Book Cover: The Red Heads

An upcoming Forest Avenue Press book that I've been excited about is The Red Heads by Rachel King. The story follows the travels of a team of lady basketball players during the height of the Great Depression. And in fact the book is based on the real All-American Red Heads, the first professional female basketball team in the country, which toured from 1936 all the way through 1986. 

You can check out more about them here and when they were inducted into the Missouri Hall of Fame here.

Yes, the ladies were expected to have red hair or dye their hair red, and yes, folks expected them to be entertainers and beauties as well as athletes, but they played by men's rules and were athletes all the way. There's cultural tension to be explored in The Red Heads, but it's also a charming, personal story.

Every Forest Avenue author, when they're first signed with the press, is given an author questionnaire to fill out. In hers, prompted with a question as to whether she had any suggestions for the editors, designers, or salespeople, Rachel jotted a quick cover idea that publisher Laura Stanfill really liked and sent to me:

"My main idea right now: a map of the United States, with a small basketball on the map that bounces from the Portland area to Idaho to Colorado and on and on and on."

I liked this idea a lot—it felt simple and elegant and just the right approach—and I got right to work, building a map of the country on which to launch our bouncing ball. I kept it simple, just a shape of the country...

...and an outline for each state.

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.