Cover Design, Part 4

The cover for the forthcoming edition of The Last Free City was in some ways the easiest I've ever made, and in others the most difficult.  To my eyes it's certainly the best.  Here is the cover, slightly altered from the earlier version:

I had been fairly clear that I wanted a cityscape as the cover image, and I had a number of pictures of Dubrovnik that I'd been working from for topography and atmosphere when writing the book.  I liked this one because it had an expanse of flat colour which would have been perfect for the lettering.

Again, though, too photorealistic and too static.  I tried superimposing another image--crossed swords--but it soon became apparent that this was the domain of trained graphic designers; the scheme was soon abandoned.

Then I had the idea of using an actual painting of a historical picture.  The constraint here was to find a copyright-free image in high enough resolution to print out clearly.  This representation of Venice from Bellini soon presented itself:

In some ways it's excellent - it captures the feel of a Renaissance city and there's plenty going on.  Too much, in fact.  It's hard to see how it would work as a cover without being impossibly cramped and busy.  But Venice put me in mind of my old friend Canaletto.  And there were several fine Canelettos out there, but the research reminded me that in many ways I preferred the work of his nephew Bellotto.  And so, after some more Googling, I came across this: not Venice at all, but Dresden, where Bellotto spent much of his career.

On finding this, naturally I wanted to use it immediately.  It has enough life to avoid being a static picture of buildings, a magnificent austere chill light, and the v-shaped patch of sky on the left of the picture is ideal for text.  No need to faff about with recolouring and artistic effects here - Bellotto's choices are already the optimum.  Is that cheating?  Maybe, but if so, just about all Penguin Classics are cheats too.

So there we have the cover of The Last Free City, with a little help from Bernado Bellotto...

Cover Design, Part 3

The Dog of the North was conceived and executed as a fantasy more epic in scope than Dragonchaser.  I could easily have come up with a cover design which followed on from the earlier model (indeed, I used a Braun and Hogenberg map of Venice to work out the topography of Mettingloom, and one of Blois for Croad).

I felt for the new novel, though, that I should try for something closer to mainstream fantasy.  This time I ransacked iStockphoto for pictures of swords and castles that I could cannibalise.  A few images presented themselves:

None of these was quite satisfactory.  The first two didn't work in the practical sense of getting text on the page, however I cropped them; the third was a beautiful image, but not for this book; and the final one had the right elements but the woman did not correspond to my image of any of the characters.

I also found this one in my files--and with hindsight, prefer it to the one I finally chose:

The image that I finally chose probably won out because it was easier to manipulate away from photo-realism:

Although it is a photograph, it doesn't really look like one.  With some relatively straightforward image manipulation and overlaying wash of colour, I ended up with something which didn't seem too far away from the feel of the book:

Which looks just fine until you see the job the professionals made of it when Macmillan New Writing picked it up...

Next: the Bellotto cover for The Last Free City.

Cover Design, Part 2

Dragonchaser was my first fantasy novel, and it was clear that a different style of cover would be needed from that employed for The Zael Inheritance.  For fantasy, the emphasis is on low-tech, so the kind of glossy image I had used before was clearly inappropriate.  Nonetheless, I wanted to avoid the traditional kind of fantasy cover, partly because square-jawed heroes and winsome damsels aren't really my thing; but also because the chances of finding a high-resolution, copyright-free image of human figures were not high.  Subsequently I've discovered a number of professional fantasy artists who do work in a way that I admire, although even then I suspect that their services would be out of my reach.  Check out Andreas Rocha, for example:

For Dragonchaser, then, I was led towards images from antiquity.  I'd long had an interest in historic maps, and particularly the pioneering 16th century work of Braun and Hogenberg.  Fortunately much of this is available in hi-res, and soon I found this image of Marseille, which topographically was all but identical to Paladria, the city at the heart of the novel (as shown in my original map).

Again some cropping was necessary, the image being both the wrong shape and adorned with the legend 'MARSEILLE',  which was not entirely helpful.

As well as cropping the image, I flipped it over to correspond more closely to the map in my head, and ended up with this:

This is close but clearly not satisfactory.  The text is far too indistinct.  A change of colour is called for, so I darken the text and lighten the background:

And that's what I would have gone with, but my daughter was adamant that the colours were muddy and indistinct, a view that wider canvassing confirmed.  You have to know when to listen to advice, and so a final version with altered colour values sprang forth:

 Voila!

And here are the ones that didn't make it:

None of these need be regretted, although they do all reflect elements of the novel.  The real problem is that they're all photographs, and they simply don't work as covers for fantasy novels.  The photo-cover smacks--with no disrespect to the authors--of self-help "How God Changed My Life" books; a respectable and popular genre, but not one a fantasy novelist is pitching at.

Next - the self-published edition of The Dog of the North, including another bout with the curse of photo-realism.

On Cover Design

My last post, displaying a draft cover for The Last Free City, occasioned the nearest thing to see hysteria we see over on ::Acquired Taste.  I fondly imagine that this is at least in part the result of fevered anticipation for the book, but it's an undeniable fact that pictures are always popular too.  With that in mind, I thought I'd set out some worked examples on cover design.  The fact that they are the work of a rank amateur, a dilettante with no concept of how to use Photoshop or Illustrator, may perhaps make them more interesting: all the examples discussed are attainable with basic IT skills and a willingness to hunt around.

The first book I ever published was The Zael Inheritance.  It was also, therefore, my first attempt at cover design.  Unlike my more recent work, Zael is science-fiction rather than fantasy, which in hindsight made the cover rather easier to design.  My cover designs can have a wearying literalism, and since the plot turns on DNA, what could be more appropriate for the cover than a double-helix?  I was lucky enough to find this image on the excellent IStockphoto.com, and instantly I knew this would fit the bill.  This is virtually ready-made as a cover.

Some basic cropping ensued to make the correct proportions for a book cover:

And from there it was simply a question of finding a suitable typeface.

Looking back through my files, I can see that I modelled several other variations on the same theme.  These were rejected for being too cluttered:

This one, on the other hand, very nearly made the cut:

Probably not quite zappy enough for an SF cover, although pleasantly retro.  The DNA image was again hoovered up from Istockphoto.

The key learning from this first attempt: 

• don't try anything too complicated.  It's much easier to adapt something which already exists than it is to create from scratch
• use very large graphics files. Anything below about 3000x2000 pixels will not have the resolution you need for a cover
• use images with plenty of space.  You need room for the title and your name
• simple software will do.  I did all my graphics manipulation in Powerpoint and Irfanview.

Next - a first fantasy cover for Dragonchaser.