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yhlee has released his pandemic project: Brain Games for Blocked Writers (link to the announcement on his blog, with where to get it), a book of tips for unblocking writers. I did the cover for it:
If you're interested in a little bit of how it came to be designed...
Yoon contacted me with a cover request for this book. I normally don't ask for the manuscript from authors, because I don't have the time to read it, and quite often the author is still writing it, but as Yoon's a friend, I wasn't sure what direction to go, and I knew it was a short book, I did so this time. I'm not sure how much conscious help this was for me, but given that a lot of art and design is done in my subconscious, maybe reading the book helped, maybe it didn't.
As part of the research for this, I created a board of comparables in Milanote, a moodboard/project planner app I use:
As you can see, the books on the left are Books on Writing By Named, Famous Authors (i.e. who will often sell on their name alone, rather than on the book description...although I admit that Anne Lamott tends to be a bit more famous in the circles I run in for her book on writing rather than her writing). The right side is mostly books specifically about the particular niche that Brain Games falls into--tips for inspiration and writers' block--and a few others whose covers I really liked that sailed alongside "finding inspiration," in the "improving your techniques" area.
From that, I could see that--as I expected--the Author Books had the author's name prominent and recognizable. The graphics of the book were relevant to both writing and the author's style and works...Chuck Palahniuk's is disturbing, John McPhee's looks like a typewritten manuscript, etc, in some cases representational (typewriter, bird referring to the title), in other cases slightly abstracted (finger-pencil)They also tend to be in either the colors of writing paper or in bold, saturated colors.
The Inspiration books also featured those bright, strong, saturated colors, usually as a background. The images are relevant to the subject, most often directly representational of the title or subject: typewriter, mic for lyrics, underwear for Take Off Your Pants!, etc. (Note on Take Off Your Pants!: the image works for both US and UK audiences...for the US you take off your pants to reveal your underwear, for the UK, your pants are your underwear.)
Milanote helped me with colors: it's got this function where you post a bunch of pictures up, and then it can pull colors from those. I did that, and got a decent spectrum of saturated and desaturated colors to work with.
The next part of my process for inspiration is to go through stock photo sites and save any image that seems the least bit relevant, which begins to stir something in the back of my brain. You can see the folder of Depositphoto images I saved here. Note that it's in reverse chronological order, and if you go to page 2 and go backwards from there, you can see how the images flowed from writing to brain to fountain pens to games as I thought about it.
Then it was time to start prototyping! I had a really, really strong image in my head, focusing on the "games" portion of the title, of an 8-bit sidescroller where the reward coming from a chest was a light bulb. I put that together with watermarked stock images, and got this:
Look, I love this image. But I can tell it's not right for this book, because it looks like the book is heavily video-game focused. It would be fabulous for a book about writing for video games, or a novel that features video games. (I also got the title wrong, but as it's a composite for review, that's OK.) I might develop it as a premade cover and post it for sale, just because I love it so much.
The next bit relied on me knowing Yoon much better than I usually know my clients. I know that he loves fountain pens, and that he's been teaching himself chess. For the next iterations, I started thinking about the fountain pens I'd saved to the collection linked above, and how I could use that...maybe make it look as if the pen were writing the title? No, too obvious. Also, a pen is a slender object, so if I feature it on the cover I'm either going to have to put it to one side, like Becca Syme's Dear Writer, You need to Quit (which would look too derivative of that cover), or I'd have to zoom way in on one part of it.
And then I remembered the chess pictures I'd saved to the collection, and it occurred to me that a fountain pen nib looks like a bishop's miter, and the idea of popping the nib on top of a chess piece hit me, and I knew it was perfect for Yoon.
Not a whole lot I can say about this? The chessboard receding into the distance to give it some dimension, but that would have worked better if I had a more 3D version of the chesspiece. The title flows nicely around the chesspiece, and it stands out because it's vibrant yellow on saturated blue. If he'd gone with this one, I'd probably have ended up desaturating the blue a bit, and reddening the chesspiece a bit. It's a perfectly cromulent cover, but it's a bit slick and the idea would work a bit better on a more corporate-y business book.
I showed Yoon all the options together, and he picked the next one, which I don't blame him, because it fit the book so much better.
This isn't the final version, just the composite:
Nice bold colors picked from the Milanote color swatches and adjusted slightly. I didn't like the slickness of the images on the blue cover for this, so I used the hand-drawn chessboard I'd found on Depositphotos for the background, to give it a more organic feel.
I will also give you my SEEKRIT INSPIRATION IMAGE for this cover. It is this, the first iteration of this design for A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie:
I love this. The title and author name are teeny, but there's a GIANT ARROW SHAPE made by the helmet pointing right up to them.
I feel they kind of lost the way with the second iteration of the design, probably because Marketing told them Abercrombie's name needed to be more prominent and they needed to put blurbs on the cover, which spoils the pure effect of the first, IMHO.
Anyway!
From there, it was mostly just refining the image. You won't have noticed (probably), but the chesspiece was a bit slender for the space and for the title to fit comfortably in without being squished, so I stretched it wider. The proportions being slightly off from that are noticeable to me, but I expect not to anyone else.
The title needed to be that flat, bright white, but it was still too slick so I added a grunge texture to make it more organic.
And now, the final version of the cover (again):
Since I know Yoon does art, I asked for a self-portrait to use as an author photo. I don't always do author photos on the back of a paperback--they seem to fit more nicely on the back flap of a hardcover--but given that Yoon is part of the selling point of the book, I felt it would humanize the book a bit more and make it even more approachable. To separate out the bullet list, I made teeny versions of the chesspiece to use as bullets, and to punctuate the spine, I put a slightly less teeny version at the bottom there.
The empty space to the right of his URL is where the barcode will be printed:
And that's that! Well, except for the myriad of tiny changes I had to make as Yoon and I discovered together how various online booksellers have changed their requirements without telling us, but that's a normal and expected part of self-publishing.
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You are best. :3
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Guess who is scheming to self-pub MOAR BOOKS somehow so I can have
[1] Subject to her availability ahahahahaha. XD
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(And it's stock images specifically because at this level of book cover, it's photo/image compositing with some editing, rather than creating illustrations from scratch.)
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(Someday if I self-pub something else and have $$$$ to throw at you, lolol...)
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(And what a great-looking book; I've just bought the ebook!)
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What a great journey of design, and an excellent result! I enjoyed this post a lot. I'd downloaded the book and enjoyed the cover, but I didn't realize that you were the designer.
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