Reading Francis

Visual creativity is not my strength, but thanks to the designers at GetCovers, I have a cover for my book that I’m really happy with.

Throughout this project, I played around with different ideas for a cover. I thought at first about an image of someone leaving a crumbling temple, but it’s hard to imagine a temple that isn’t connected to a specific religious or cultural tradition, and all the visualizations I could come up with ended up looking like a fantastic cover for a sci-fi/fantasy book, but not so much this book.

I considered some other ideas, but they kept devolving into cartoonish images that didn’t seem right either.

Finally I settled on this, an idol in a trash bin.

GetCovers is an interesting firm in that they’re based in Ukraine. I really liked the idea of supporting a business in such an embattled country, and they were great to work with. The initial concept had a background like white crumpled paper, which fit the trash can image. To be honest, though, I didn’t have a good feeling about a book cover design that looked like it had already been thrown away before it was even bought. So they subbed in the marbled look (that seemed more temple-ish, at least to me), and used a gilded font that I really love.

Hopefully you will, too!