Cover Design Process! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Trucking closer every day to "send off .pdf proof for sample" day (mid-week ... end of week? something like that).  You folks helped me decide that a 2-page spread for the cover design was the way to go!

Upon reviewing all the options available for large, landscape-orientation images, I landed on this one by Denise Grant: this one has exactly the right feel for the contents (images & copy) of the book. Now that the insides of the book are complete, it became clear quite quickly that some of the other images I shared with you folks in an earlier poll weren't the right 'tone'. Some were too soft; others – while visually pleasing with a nice balance of negative space – didn't show clearly that there's some sort of something happening with latex, or didn't clearly communicate at least a rough idea of what might be inside the cover.

Which leaves one remaining question: what to do with text on the cover?

I did some mock-ups for the cover sans-text – and it looks pretty good [image below]. BUT – I have a penpal in Sweden who does some graphic design and I was chatting with him about this particular dilemma as well.  He encouraged me to really consider having at least some nice, clean, minimal design on the front cover. I decided to give it a shot. 

(((BY THE WAY – I took lots of progress videos & screenshots of the book-in-making, but I've been hanging on to them so that I don't completely let the cat out of the bag with all the beautiful images inside (and the essays too – I'm really proud of them!). I'll be sure to share those here after allowing a decent window of time to let everyone's books arrive in their mailboxes (barring any unforeseen pandemic-postal-service delays)))

If any of these speak more strongly to you than another, or if you see something I've missed that's irking your delicate design sensibilities, please sound off in the comments below or shoot me a DM!  

Otherwise, enjoy the continuing madness.

To begin, I've been pouring over all the large-format coffee table reference books and art books in my apartment and taking some design cues and inspiration from them. Ironically, a lot of the cleanest / nicest designs (in my opinion) are the ones with nothing but the barcode and ISBN on the back (and here I was thinking that I'd have a blank front and words on the back! har har. )

First up, we have a demo spread of the margins for the cover design layout in InDesign. (this is also what it would look like if I end up deciding to scrap any cover text, FYI!)

The centre column is obviously the spine; the pink margins show the 'safe' area for text; the black margins show the edge of the cover (there is another set of margins beyond that which I've cropped out, called the 'bleed' – if you want an image to print edge-to-edge, you have to make it go OVER the black outline .... things I've learned in my last 5 days of insanity teaching myself InDesign lol). 

I like the spine text – it's a little potato-quality here, but it's clear, legible, and has my lil' logo at the bottom like some of the photo books in my home library that I really like the design of. 

... so I moved on to playing with the arrangement of just the front page.  

Next, I played with a few different styles of font and text. I've included the full cover spread as well as a tighter screenshot of just the front covers here – personally, I found it hard to visualize what it looks like when I could see the big blank back cover at the same time and the spine text at a 90-degree angle juxtaposed with it.

This was my second or third crack at it.This one has font families that are used on the interior of the book, but I wasn't completely sold on how 'CIRCUS' was getting eaten up by the saturation of the background image. It didn't work well in white, either: 

Next I moved on to spacing out the text a bit from that 'square' orientation. I thought that anchoring it with some weight at the bottom of the frame might ground the cover.

Ultimately, I think that elements of this font family work just fine on the inside of the book, but aren't best suited to letting this image shine and being clear, readable, and un-crowded: 

I wasn't ready to give up quite yet on this text orientation & placement on the page, so I mucked around with some other font families. I liked the readability of this font better than the example above, but this one didn't feel quite right to me yet either. Ultimately, I think having everything at the bottom makes it a little cramped:

Then I decided to split things up and – BOOM. I think we have a winner!

I think this one has a good visual balance. 

It's legible, the letters have a spacing between all of them that lets the words breathe without looking strung out, & the colour contrast in the top line is pleasing to me. 

Splitting the title and subtitle lines between the top and bottom of the page lets us enjoy the image in the negative space in between the lines of text, too (my screenshot / crop job makes it look like VACUUM is unevenly placed on this first image, but it's proper and centred in InDesign, I swear):

And there we have it, for now!
Back to burying myself neck-deep in my laptop again ...

XO ~ Ess