Project Notes: Death of a Nom De Plume Cover

One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards.

I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting these gigs. Design is very much not-my-specialty — everything I know about pulling covers and layouts together is largely the product of short courses and teaching myself things as I go — and I have a good deal of imposter syndrome about saying yes and ruining someone else’s project.

At the same time, these freelance gigs typically push me to learn how to do stuff I normally wouldn’t, and I’m generally happier doing projects that push me to learn new things (and, despite having imposter syndrome, I do actually enjoy the creative challenge of cover design).

Weirdly, the project I finally said yes to ended up being the most ambitious and pushed me way out of my comfort zone in terms of genre–pulling together the cover for Death of a Nom-de-Plum, a cosy 50s police procedural that was recovered from documents of the late Australian playwright Dorothy Blewett by UQ’s teaching-focused Corella Press.

The first real challenge with doing a design gig for someone else, rather than a Brain Jar project, largely came down to control and familiarity. This was the first time I’d designed a cover to someone else’s brief instead of having final say on the look and feel. Also, the first project I’ve designed where I wasn’t intimately familiar with the MS, and largely worked from someone else’s notes and comparative title research when pulling together early iterations and approaches.

It proved an interesting exercise in trying to nail the genre: cosy mystery leans towards illustrations of characters in one branch of the genre, and big country houses in another, and this book wasn’t-quite-a-cosy given that it had a lot of the hallmarks, but also features a procedural element with the DI main character. We went through a few potential approaches, both illustrated and country house and a few other types in between, and in the end, the touchstone for the book became the TV show Midsummer Murders, which meant I spent half a day investigating the layouts and font choices that went into their DVD covers as well as a bunch of other English country murder mystery shows.

The other problem with the big landscape/country house conventions is that a lot of the stock art that’s easy to drop into an image is often already in use, particularly if you’re talking about a very particular area or era. Which meant getting an image that felt like it belonged to this book, rather than a half-dozen other books, meant editing together a composite out of component parts.

This isn’t unusual for a small press book, but most of my Brain Jar Press covers are pretty straightforward with a maximum of two or three images going towards the final composite. As the design process for Death of a Nom De Plume wore on, and we started to settle on the kind of imagery that would best represent the book, the final cover ended up being assembled out of five or six seperate images of the Cornwall coast that were edited into a single whole. That’s a lot of cutting and blending together, and thinking about the way light works in the image to make sure none of the shadows are subtly out of place.

The perfectionist part of me keeps looking at the cover and dreaming about what could have been done with an extra day or two, but that’s true of any creative image. I often salve myself with the great irony of cover design: About 80% of the heavy lifting in terms of genre are done by the font and colour scheme; the image just needs to look appropriate enough to get by.

The other major request for the job was for a full wrap cover, with an image extending from front cover to back in a seamless whole. This is something that’s pretty rare in many parts of the book world, and having gone through the process of pulling one together I understand why. It’s finicky to do, eats up enormous amounts of time, and makes redesigns considerably harder if you have to, say, re-do the cover because extra pages have been added.

I pretty much hit the end of this job and swore “never again.” Then promptly turned around and did the exact same thing for the cover of Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales and ran into the exact same issues, which goes to show that writing detailed notes after you finish a project is not exactly helpful if you’re not going to pay attention to them.

(Seriously, though. NEVER DO A FULL WRAP COVER AGAIN. If Brain Jar ever attempts it, it’ll be because I’ve hired someone else to do the heavy lifting).