A book by its cover
Just about a year ago as I was writing I’m here to help, some thoughts as to what the cover of the book might look like popped into my head.
Decades ago at San Francisco State, I poking around the perimeters of the School of Creative Arts before finally settled into the Design and Industry Department. One of my favorite classes was Graphics Design.
Being as ancient as I am, that was long before computers were used to layout restaurant menus or album covers. Photoshop was a brick and mortar storefront down the street where you brought your roll of 35 mm Kodacolor II for processing.
Cutting and Pasting as you slogged away on artwork was just that: carefully trimming photographs and long strips of lettering that was never quite the size and font that you wanted and eventually gluing everything down with lumpy rubber cement onto a presentation board.
It was a lot of work for often mediocre results.
I’ve since moved on with everyone else to more modern, computer-based graphic design. The scissors and the rubber cement stay in the desk drawer now.
But I still think of artwork as crudely cut bits of paper that can be slid around on a blank background before a dollop of rubber cement forever affixes them into place.
In January, I engaged the design services of my talented nephew, Clinton Anderson, and he and I toyed with several ideas for the cover of I’m here to help.
Without giving away the story, I’m here to help is about a woman named Sharon who tells her seventeen year old daughter, Renita, a long hidden tale about her past. Sharon does this by using many family photos that hang on the living room wall of their house.
Clint and I quickly decided that we both liked the idea of a mishmash of photographs spread haphazardly across a white wall for the background of the cover.
In a line from Chapter 2 of I’m here to help, Sharon describes the wall of pictures as “frozen memories; some happy, many sad and some a bit mysterious.”
We dug around and came up with a dozen or so candidates that were happy, sad or mysterious and then spent hours arranging them in a way that seemed both apparently random and subtly ironic.
When you buy a copy, either the e-book or the paperback, look just above the young woman on the front (She’s a wonderful professional model named Jordan Michaela Fowler. You can see more of her work at www.jordan-fowler.com.), there is a proud and a bit enigmatic black and white of a four year old tyke; that’s me.
Just behind Jordan/ Renita’s head is smiling elderly woman in blue: my mother and Clint’s grandma.
The portrait of my mom wraps around the spine of the paperback allowing my dad, who is next to her, to watch over the back cover copy. I guess that he is insuring that no shenanigans will break out amongst the verbs and nouns or especially those unruly adjectives.
A more recent picture of me peers out from behind some text just above the bar code. I accidentally snapped the photo a few years ago while I toyed with the self-timer on a new camera. It’s slightly out of focus and I have a mild look of annoyance at my difficulties with the unfamiliar gadget.
A good portion of my large family, past and present, populates the frames on the cover, including Clint’s kids and his wife. My brother Mark and his three kids peek out around Jordan’s hands on the front of the book.
Clint decided that our model should be gazing at a picture frame. As simple as it sounds, it required around two hundred shots to come up with one that was just right. There is a good deal of mystery in the book and we wanted to convey that on the cover. The angle of the frame and how Jordan held it sometimes threw off otherwise perfectly good shots. I wanted to add to the elusiveness of the cover by just showing a mere sliver of Jordan’s face.
Everything came together in one shot about halfway through the session.
The “picture” that Jordan is holding catches nearly everyone’s eye and I’ve been asked many questions about it, “Is it a mirror? Is it a photo of the character Renita? Is it one of the many snapshots mentioned in the book? Is she studying an image of one of the other characters?”
We had talked about Jordan holding an empty frame but Clint decided to create a colorful abstract image to clutch instead. As he snapped away, he asked her what she could make of the swirling and undefined image. If she flagged a bit, he would suggest that perhaps she was holding the abstract upside down.
It is blurred a bit from the original photo taken during the shoot, but that is what she saw.
Decades ago at San Francisco State, I poking around the perimeters of the School of Creative Arts before finally settled into the Design and Industry Department. One of my favorite classes was Graphics Design.
Being as ancient as I am, that was long before computers were used to layout restaurant menus or album covers. Photoshop was a brick and mortar storefront down the street where you brought your roll of 35 mm Kodacolor II for processing.
Cutting and Pasting as you slogged away on artwork was just that: carefully trimming photographs and long strips of lettering that was never quite the size and font that you wanted and eventually gluing everything down with lumpy rubber cement onto a presentation board.
It was a lot of work for often mediocre results.
I’ve since moved on with everyone else to more modern, computer-based graphic design. The scissors and the rubber cement stay in the desk drawer now.
But I still think of artwork as crudely cut bits of paper that can be slid around on a blank background before a dollop of rubber cement forever affixes them into place.
In January, I engaged the design services of my talented nephew, Clinton Anderson, and he and I toyed with several ideas for the cover of I’m here to help.
Without giving away the story, I’m here to help is about a woman named Sharon who tells her seventeen year old daughter, Renita, a long hidden tale about her past. Sharon does this by using many family photos that hang on the living room wall of their house.
Clint and I quickly decided that we both liked the idea of a mishmash of photographs spread haphazardly across a white wall for the background of the cover.
In a line from Chapter 2 of I’m here to help, Sharon describes the wall of pictures as “frozen memories; some happy, many sad and some a bit mysterious.”
We dug around and came up with a dozen or so candidates that were happy, sad or mysterious and then spent hours arranging them in a way that seemed both apparently random and subtly ironic.
When you buy a copy, either the e-book or the paperback, look just above the young woman on the front (She’s a wonderful professional model named Jordan Michaela Fowler. You can see more of her work at www.jordan-fowler.com.), there is a proud and a bit enigmatic black and white of a four year old tyke; that’s me.
Just behind Jordan/ Renita’s head is smiling elderly woman in blue: my mother and Clint’s grandma.
The portrait of my mom wraps around the spine of the paperback allowing my dad, who is next to her, to watch over the back cover copy. I guess that he is insuring that no shenanigans will break out amongst the verbs and nouns or especially those unruly adjectives.
A more recent picture of me peers out from behind some text just above the bar code. I accidentally snapped the photo a few years ago while I toyed with the self-timer on a new camera. It’s slightly out of focus and I have a mild look of annoyance at my difficulties with the unfamiliar gadget.
A good portion of my large family, past and present, populates the frames on the cover, including Clint’s kids and his wife. My brother Mark and his three kids peek out around Jordan’s hands on the front of the book.
Clint decided that our model should be gazing at a picture frame. As simple as it sounds, it required around two hundred shots to come up with one that was just right. There is a good deal of mystery in the book and we wanted to convey that on the cover. The angle of the frame and how Jordan held it sometimes threw off otherwise perfectly good shots. I wanted to add to the elusiveness of the cover by just showing a mere sliver of Jordan’s face.
Everything came together in one shot about halfway through the session.
The “picture” that Jordan is holding catches nearly everyone’s eye and I’ve been asked many questions about it, “Is it a mirror? Is it a photo of the character Renita? Is it one of the many snapshots mentioned in the book? Is she studying an image of one of the other characters?”
We had talked about Jordan holding an empty frame but Clint decided to create a colorful abstract image to clutch instead. As he snapped away, he asked her what she could make of the swirling and undefined image. If she flagged a bit, he would suggest that perhaps she was holding the abstract upside down.
It is blurred a bit from the original photo taken during the shoot, but that is what she saw.
No comments have been added yet.
