Eve by Melanie Brown (Patreon)

This is the cover for Melanie Brown's new book which should be coming out from DopplerPress very soon.

Melanie sent me several files of what she thought the cover might look like. Several of these were images I could acquire from one of the stock photo sites but each of those had some flaw for my purpose. The chief flaw being no good way to add a title to the image. I picked out a similar image from one of the stock image places where we have an account and cropped it to fit the proportions of a book.

I widened the image slightly (which has the effect of softening fierce expressions), added typography and adjusted the contrast and tone balance.

For the fonts, I experimented with several families but settled on variations of Arial. Since the word Eve is so short, I used large and small caps to give it more weight. This looked odd for some reason, so I made the small caps bigger in proportion to the initial E and I raised the baseline slightly. The title and and DopplerPress logo are both bold, italic Arial Black. Melanie Brown is done in bold, italic Arial standard. Melanie is also kerned differently (the letters are spaced further apart). In the title Eve, I kerned each of the letters by hand to make the title look balanced and increase legibility.

The story is about a young transwoman going through transition and like all Melanie Brown books, it is very good.