The first decision I made was to have a picture of Scotland in the background. The cover had to take the viewer to the setting. I Googled and found this image.
Perfect! It had a lamb and a fence that I mention in the first chapter and the colors were spectacular and the hills were just right and . . . *dies from perfection*
My next step was to find a font. I wanted something that looked modern yet invoked the mystery and beauty of the Highlands. I found many Celtic fonts, but everything was either too old-fashioned or too ornamental--fonts schoolchildren would use for a St. Patrick's Day scrapbook. Besides, I wanted something Scottish, not Irish. I finally found a font called Auptimagh that I fell in love with. I especially love how it styles the capital "A" and the lowercase "d."
I realized that Auptimagh wouldn't look right on the back cover so I stuck with the reliable but often overlooked Garamond.
I used a 9 in. by 6 in. book cover template my professor provided and came up with the following. Note that the quotes were written by me. Unfortunately, Sophie Kinsella, Gail Carson Levine, and John Green did not actually say these things. (But maybe one day they will.)
I didn't have much space for publishing or author information so I included a QR code to make up for it.
Also, I didn't include the lamb. There are sheep in the book, but they won't look too cute on the front cover.
It wasn't until I showed it to the class that I realized I had left out half the title. (There were many running jokes about "a half-done title.") Of course, there are spelling mistakes and the font on the back cover isn't right.
But apart from those mistakes, I wasn't sure how to improve it until my professor wondered what the focal point of the cover was. Was it the small tree or something else?
Here, I realized, was the problem with my image. As gorgeous as it was, it had too much going on. The viewer doesn't know what's important in the image or if there is any significance to the elements within the image.
So I went out looking again, and found this beauty.
I realized I could use the focus and out-of-focus parts of the image, and I didn't have to use the whole image. This way, there was less to look at and more contrasting colors and textures. No more light green on dark green on Kelly green on hunter green.
The rest of the process was comprised of small ideas that made big differences.
I wanted to made the edge different from the rest of the book as I realized the title wouldn't quite stand out the way I wanted it to. I selected the section and filled it with black.
One of my classmate's book covers featured the logo of the publishing company: Pink Unicorn Publishing. As it turns out, the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland (which, by the way, is AWESOME). I didn't want a pink logo as I felt it would stand out too much, so I used a gray version of it.
I realized I didn't need to tell the viewer to scan the QR code. After all, QR codes are for scanning. So, I removed the the code and replaced it with the publisher logo.
Garamond had to go. It was bland and killed the beauty. I wanted to use an elegant serif font to contrast and compliment the Auptimagh font. I found one called Artifika and then decided to use Bodoni for the quotes.
I added a layer of white and adjusted it to the size needed to cover the text. Then I adjusted the opacity to let the background image show through but still allow the text to be readable. I used the eraser to soften the edges.
The last steps were to fix the spelling errors, rewrite the summary, add a tagline, and make sure the title was complete.
