- ✔ Choose a book:
- How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibb
- ✔ Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare
- The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa
- The World According to Garp - John Irving
- Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel - Gary Shteyngart
- The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears - Dinaw Mengestu
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
- The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
- ✔ Generate a color palette.
- ✔ Research your book on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Be sure that you are clear on the topic and mood. During what time period does the story take place? In which country? What are the themes of the book?
- ✔ Write a list of 5-10 keywords describing the book. Head to Kuler and sign in to the account you created in Exercise Two. Enter your keywords into the Search field. Choose the color theme that you feel best expresses your book, then download the .ase file. Launch Photoshop and replace the swatches in the Swatches panel. (Go to Window > Swatches. From the Swatches panel's pop-up menu, select Replace Swatches and navigate to your .ase file.)
- ✔ Choose a font:
- ✔ Like color, typography is very expressive. Every font has a different voice. A delicate script has a poetic tone, whereas as a heavy serif font is more authoritative. Find the font that fits the "voice" of your book.
- ✔ If you already have the perfect font, great. If your font library is a little bare, do a search for "beautiful free fonts" on Google. Many online design magazines regularly publish listings of free fonts. Articles with titles like 15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts or 45+ Most Wanted Beautiful Free Hand Drawn Fonts are bound to provide some interesting options.
- ✔ Download the font of your choice to your desktop, then install. Here are instructions for Mac or PC from myfonts.com.
- ✔ If you are having trouble choosing a font, then I suggest Helvetica. You can't go wrong.
- Search for images (optional).
- You don't need to use images on your book cover. In fact, I love to see designs with just type and color. Google "best typographic book covers" for inspiration.
- If you have a photo or illustration in mind, that's fine too. The only limitation is no color photography. That would be too easy since the colors are already there! You can use a photograph as inspiration for your subject matter, just convert it to grayscale and then recolor using your Kuler color theme.
- Flickr is a terrific image resource. Select the "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content" option at the bottom of the Advanced Search page so you won't violate copyright regulations.
jun 13 2011 ∞
jun 21 2011 +
jun 21 2011 +