book cover design

I’d really love to have a prospective cover for my upcoming book “Portuguese Whitework” on show at the Sydney Craft Show in June. That means that I need to get onto it now. It usually takes a while for me to start “seeing” properly when I do photography. It takes me several film’s worth (what an old concept a roll of film is!) to start seeing artistically, with good composition.

So I took some photos the other day of one of the completed embroideries for the book. I did some close up, some further away, some angled, some straight… lots of variations.

Then I chose the best of them and placed them in a layout that is the size of the book. I put the words on, and moved things around. I like to have the title of my book quite close to the top as it means that if its in a rack of books with only its top showing, you’ll know what its about.

Because of all the words at the top of the page, it usually means that there needs to be a reasonably blank bit of image behind it, so that the words and the image are not fighting one another. There’s not much point in having the words there if you can’t read them on top of the photo!

Creating a good cover usually takes me quite some time. I usually create heaps of different ones, using different images, different layouts of the words, different colours for the lettering, different typefaces. I refine my ideas as I go, discarding designs that don’t work so well.

The book title itself is also really important. It has to reveal the contents of the book in just a couple of words. Its the ultimate poetry really! I use my subtitle to further explain what’s in the book.

For my Ukrainian embroidery book “Ukrainian Drawn Thread Embroidery: Merezhka Poltavska” I had to be very careful about the title. How many of you would confidently walk into a shop to ask for a book called “Merezhka Poltavska”? I suspect most of you aren’t even sure how to pronounce that – and quite rightly too, as they’re not easy words for an English speaker. But I needed to include those words somehow in the title because they accurately name the type of work it is, for those who do know a little more about these things. Merezhka is the type of needlework, and Poltavska means that it comes from Poltava. So they became the subtitle, and the main title was more descriptive.

I am in a similar situation with my new Portuguese book, because once again we are dealing with non-English words. So again, I will need to be creative with my naming.

It is fun solving all these problems!