Designing for grandma’s novel

HONEYSUCKLE DRIFT COVER ART

My grandmother deserves my time and love, and I often fall short of delivering. That is one of the reasons I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to do some design work for her during the past 4 months. She recently finished a novel that she has been working on for decades, and she asked for my help to design the page layout and cover.

First I did the interior design for her novel, click here for interior file, which required professional use of Adobe InDesign as well as having good taste in the mechanics of page layout. My grandmother and I were very critical when deciding what point size to set text as well as which type styles to use. I also had to have a keen eye for appropriate use of margins, leading, tracking, hyphenation, scene breaks, chapter headings, page folios and so on. I am happy to say that the interior of her novel is just perfect.

Now moving onto cover design—no small task for an author or graphic designer. With all of the years that go into writing a novel one cannot settle for anything less than amazing. The cover you see above took about 15 hours to create and is still unfinished —Great works are never finished.

Below I show the first draft of the cover, created when the novel was titled “Honeysuckle Heaven”. The first draft was put together simply to get a visual of the design concept: a paragraph written by my grandmother that described the scene shown. Also below are some of the images chosen and manipulated in order to compose the cover. I want to emphasize that even a single character had to be created from may separate images, and that I had to go through tens-of-thousands of images to find just the right ones. I love working with Adobe Photoshop, the software where in which the roots of my design career lie. I am hoping that my grandmother chooses to use my cover for her novel. She is currently considering her options. Either way the hours I put into it gained me design experience and a portfolio piece ( :

I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to work on my grandmother’s novel, Honeysuckle Drift. It’s an honor to be listed within the novel as the interior designer, and I hope that she choses to work with me to perfect her novel’s cover by the end of 2016.