For this week’s weekend book cover experiment, I got a fantasy novella from Laura Christensen. She commissioned an original piece of cover art from Natasha Alterici.
THIS ART IS AWESOME. My primary job here is to not ruin it with a bad design.
This requires absolutely no additional images, so my whole job is choosing the fonts. For a fantasy, especially historical fantasy, I like serifs. To my surprise, the major factor seems to be finding a font with a decent Q. I scan through my fonts and decide High Tower Text looks appropriately epic-fantasy. I just learned how to do a decent metallic font, so I want to flex that new muscle.
On the way I find Onyx which looks like it’ll be great for the author name. (It looks familiar, in a mass-market paperback kind of way. I can’t place it. Anyone?) I want to use that blue accent on her gloves and shoes in the author name. I apply an outline around the author name and a texture over it.
There’s space for a blurb over to the left, so I put some smoke behind it to make it easier to read, and use the same font as the title. Seriously, this art is composed so perfectly for this purpose.
I like this a whole lot. Some things I don’t love: the white behind the title is too obviously shaped like the letters. The title doesn’t stand out as well as I’d like in thumbnail size. The blue text is too hard to read against the brown background. (I weep to lose it.) The title is a little lopsided for my taste. I look up a few authors and find it’s more common not to put a space between initials. (Who knew?)
This leads to my usual disastrous session of Trying Things.
I pull these together into an iteration that uses what I think are the best versions of each element. I contact the author about the blurb; she doesn’t have one, so I write a tagline based on the description.
This was a different challenge than the usual one of making stock art look halfway decent. I think original art is a great strategy for fantasy covers, but only if you can get something as high-quality as this piece. She’s open to commissions, I understand.
The story that goes with this cover is available to read on Wattpad!
What do you think? Does the text work with the image, or get in the way? What tweaks would you make?
FONTS, TOP TO BOTTOM
- High Tower Text
- Onyx
IMAGE SOURCES
- Cover image: Original art by Natasha Alterici
- Pink texture: http://dezignus.com/%D1%81olorful-grunge-textures/ via Designus — free for the price of signing up for their newsletter
TIME TO CREATE
- About 2 hours for the first draft, then another 2 hours of fiddling
See all my book cover designs here. Inquiries accepted.
March 2, 2015 at 10:32 am
I think it’s awesome! The only thing that bugs me is that the title emphasis is on “Banners” rather than “Queen”… but looking at your other iterations, I can definitely see why you did it this way. It would be tough to get a version that emphasizes Queen and still looks as good as this one.
March 2, 2015 at 10:39 am
I agree, I would have loved to make Queen the dominant word in the title, but it was hard to fit the rest of it!
March 2, 2015 at 12:08 pm
[…] I have also been intrigued by Amanda C. Davis’ recent forays into designing covers for DIY practice. She’s been tackling all kinds of covers, and I previously let her know that I was interested her in giving my novella a shot. Am so glad I did that, because my laptop has been giving me all kinds of troubles, and there’d be no way I could do the cover design myself right now. As soon as Natasha got back to me on the final cover, I sent it Amanda’s way. Amanda posted her design/learning process here. […]
March 2, 2015 at 3:03 pm
Another terrific cover! I especially like the stacked fonts in the title. And well done enhancing the outstanding original art with the cover details. Well done!
March 2, 2015 at 3:05 pm
Thank you! 😀
March 7, 2015 at 6:21 pm
This is very professional looking! I would expect to see a cover like this on a thick, creamy hardback 🙂