Jake is loaded with Young Man's Ennui: his life is full of beer, chocolate, pissing away the workday, and
attempts at hipster-friendly self-deprecating dry humor. However, in his spare time (where else could he fit anything in?!?) he uses Photoshop to change photographs into
book covers for books that don't exist. He's so proud of his work that he splurged on a domain name and some
hand-drawn fonts for quirky cred, but the site hasn't been up long, so there's only a few examples.
As far as what he's got up so far, it's clearly an exercise in trying to produce art by only knowing the outcome without understanding the process, like your uncle Ben plinking on the piano, certain he could write commercial jingles despite his lack of musical training. Not that book covers are
that complex, but Jake's results are hit and miss. When they do hit, however, they can be quite good. Many of his fake book-covers fall into the Lulu/PublishAmerica fallacy that
overlaying a fancy font is enough to make a cover. When the covers
do work, however, Jake stumbles upon some basic design skills, making the font and the structure of the cover work together, like the example above and
this one. Those two create intriguing covers that don't explicitly tell anything about the story, but encourage the reader to delve further. In the one above, you wonder, "which one is the painter?" "where are they at?" "why are they walking together, close enough to be friends, but with a respectable 'personal space'?" The image has a lot of lines that tend to intesect between the walker's heads, but the title and subtitle are cock-eyed in a way that their perpendicular lines intersect at the horizon, just above the people's heads; the tall structure of the bridge on the right is balanced on the left by the off-centered walkers — it creates a lot of movement to keep the eye drawn to the cover, which is exactly what you want it to do. While it's not the greatest cover ever made in the world (and, dear
god, stop using unnecessary Filters) , it could easily be found on a shelf in Barnes & Noble without wondering, "
holy crap, what self-published local leveraged their address to get on one bookseller's shelves?" I'm not saying that Penguin's going to knock on Jake's door any day soon with a design job, but there's legions of freelance book cover designers that are producing crap, so Jake's really not that far off from turning his work-avoiding hobby into a real job.
Labels: blogging, book cover, graphic design
Book Cover Evolution
You don't think awesome book covers start out that way, do you? Print Magazine talked to several cover designers in order to get a better picture of the design evolution of some recent covers. It's not a bad thing, despite the title "Kill Your Darlings": one designer wisely said, "It’s actually a good exercise to have to redesign something," something I remember being told back when I was in theatrical design classes. Working on one design, you rule out everything else; but what do you get when you rule out everything else and the most obvious option? When that best final option actually hits the bookshelves, designers will be happy to know that it's very unlikely anybody had an epiphany and produced that cover the first time out of the gate: the amount of work exceeds what actually shows up in print.
