On the Soro Design Book Design Blog, Cecilia Sorochin offers a multi-part blog series. In the series, Cecilia walks you through the professional designer’s process of designing not only the cover and interior layout of a book, but the design of a companion website as well. You can learn a lot from her, and if you like, you can even hire her.
I find the design process really interesting, maybe more than the finished work.
Why? (just my point of view) Because during that collaborative process between designer & (ideally) author is where the visual personality of the book will be defined.
PART I: The Book Cover
We get the manuscript for the design of the book cover, layout & website for A Worthy Legacy by author Tomi Akinyanmi.
A Worthy Legacy is a story about life and the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. The author combines the last wise words of her beloved grandfather together, along with a few of her own thoughts to create a compelling story about real life.
Read the manuscript
From just a glance, the overall feel of the book should come out.
Then look for the voice: my starting point for every book is the belief that authors write books because they have something to say. By reading a manuscript, I need to find what it is that they had to say, who says it, how it is said, & from which point of view.
Sooner or later (usually very soon) some details are revealed, and often I find in those little details the key to the cover.
Reading A Worthy Legacy I learned that the author, originally from Nigeria now living in the U.S., tells many insights about the Yoruba Tribe, which totally fascinated me… & gave the book the ‘unique’ factor.
Go to the Soro Design Book Design Blog to: see what sorts of images the manuscript brought to the designer’s mind, view her early cover design ideas, learn which one the author ultimately chose, and read more of the series.