Designing A Book Cover for ‘The Cards We’re Dealt’

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Pexels

This post is about how I designed my cover for my first novel, The Cards We’re Dealt.

I absolutely LOVED this part of the self-publishing process! Having always been interested in design and drawing, perhaps I didn’t find this part as daunting as other writers out there. I would have loved to have paid for a professional designer to design the cover for my book, but I don’t have the budget for that at present.

So, let me walk you through my book cover design process.

Research sources

Although I might enjoy drawing and painting in my free time, I decided to start from the basis that I knew very little about book cover design. What works, what doesn’t, how things can go wrong, how things can go right.

I read many articles about designing a cover, and I also listened to more than my fair share of podcasts during my self-publishing journey. Cover Meeting, in the episode with Micaela Alcaino, was extremely insightful, and the Pen to Published podcast was great at pointing out when to use serif and sans serif fonts in book design.

Finding inspiration when designing a book cover

A lot of the articles I read beforehand said to take a look at covers in your genre and identify what you like about them, so I did.

These are three of my favourite covers in recent years:

Starting with the first, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,’ what I love about this is it’s so eye-catching and colourful. Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ used in the background is such an iconic painting, and the typeface used screams “video game,” which makes you wonder what the two could possibly have in common.

With ‘Blue Sisters,’ I love the pared back simplicity, as well as the art used. Not many covers on my bookshelf have a white background, which makes it a bold choice, as well as extremely legible. And the artwork is striking: it instantly draws you in and has you asking questions.

Lastly, ‘Hello, Beautiful’ is kind of a combination of the previous two (clearly, my tastes are set!). It has vibrant colours, and the entire cover is given over to a piece of art. To offset it against the colourful background, the designer has used a clean, simple, white font for the title and author name.

To the drawing board…

Photo by Monstera Production on Pexels

Another key piece of advice I came across was to simply play around with some ideas and pick what you like from them. Then, once you’ve got two or three good mock-ups, they’ll stand out far beyond the others and you’ll have your shortlist. Take those designs and work on improving them.

I’ll walk you through the designs I came up with and hopefully you’ll see the progress I made! From something dead amateur to some options I was pretty pleased with! Of course, I’ll save the final cover reveal for a separate post all of its own ;)

(I am the owner and designer of all of the cover designs posted below. They may not be reproduced in any way without my permission.)

Attempts 1, 2 and 3

The Cards We’re Dealt features three strong personalities who I felt were all deserving of some form of representation on the cover, if possible.

I started with headshot silhouettes on a plain background, then decided to frame them on the next one. I played around with background colours and textures, borders and frames, but none of these felt right, apart from the contrasts with the colours, which I liked in all three.

For attempt 3, I moved away from the headshot silhouettes to three guitars to tie into the musical element.

As for the typeface (or what many people think of as the font), I wasn’t convinced by any of these three options. The lettering is too curved, and the mix of caps and non-caps doesn’t work for me.

On attempt 1, I kept it centred, which worked, but the sizing in letters felt too different. On attempt 2, I didn’t like the layout with the title separated in two parts. And on attempt 3, I went with the staggered option from left to right, following how we read from left to right, but it feels off as well.

Attempt 4

I liked the three guitars I used to represent the siblings and the musical element of my book in attempt 3 above, so I took that into this one.

I looked back at the three covers I chose as my inspiration and decided I was missing some form of art. So I chose a splash of colour for the background. Like colourful brush strokes. I really liked it, but the guitars get a little lost in all the colour behind.

I chose the same typeface structure and confirmed the left to right offset position wasn’t working for me. Neither was the textured background.

I felt like I was improving, but it still wasn’t there yet.

Keep it simple – attempt 5

Photo by Pixabay

The cover I’ve actually gone for in the end came here in the process – attempt 5.

I decided I was getting too focused on the backgrounds and colours and textures, so I decided to strip things back: background, typeface, colour scheme. And it worked.

It still has flashes of colour and hints of artwork that I liked about the three covers I chose for inspiration. It has the representation of the three siblings through silhouettes that I was looking for, with good colour contrasts.

And in this one, I felt like I finally got it when it came to the typeface.

I really liked attempt 5 straight away, and I knew it would be in my shortlist, but I kept playing around with more designs to have others to compare it with.

Attempt 6

I decided to move away from plainer backgrounds. Both ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ and ‘Hello, Beautiful’, which I mentioned above as inspiration, have “busier” backgrounds so I decided to give it a try.

I took the idea of a blue background from one of my previous attempts and incorporated colours that complemented (light blue) and contrasted (magenta). The guitar keeps the musical element there, and the cards are a reference to the title as well as a hint to Las Vegas, one of the settings in my novel, and a nod to one of the themes running through The Cards We’re Dealt.

For the typeface, I carried over what I liked from attempt 4: all caps and centred, a sans serif font, in a colour that stands out.

However, as much as I initially liked this cover, there’s something off about it that took me a while to get. Or two things, really:

-          Firstly, the cards aren’t symmetrical which, in a busy cover, is necessary. You need some sort of hierarchy or control, and this just doesn’t have it for me.

-          Secondly, the cards look false. Or rather, they don’t fit the design. They almost look like photographs of the real thing, so they don’t match the graphic design: The guitar is a silhouette graphic; the swirls and motifs used in light blue and magenta are graphics. Book cover design can fall apart when you slap a photograph of something onto a book cover with no real thought.

These cards would look far better if they were artistically drawn, with shadow and shading, or even curved into a more abstract form. But this is something beyond my talents, sadly!

So I moved on.

Attempt 7

I tried again, but this time with symmetry. Instead of random swirls and motifs, I decided to be more selective about what I chose. And look how far I’d come! Compare this design to those first designs!

I went for music-related graphics: acoustic guitars, electric guitars, microphones, music notes, and more.

Then I returned to my earlier designs with the silhouettes of my main characters, but I used full-body silhouettes.

I kept the typeface simple as it had worked well in my previous attempts. Clean letters, all caps, sans serif, a concise subtitle, a nice contrast between the black and the cream.

I LOVED this cover. I still love this cover and think it’s a pretty great attempt for someone who isn’t a professional designer, even if I do say so myself :D

I loved it so much that I played around with my colour options and inverted it: light where there was dark, and dark where there was light. This was the result of that:

The shortlist

In the end, it came down to my chosen cover (attempt 5), attempt 7 with the black background, and the inverted version with yellow and orange.

The choice was really tough, but in the end I felt the option I chose best represented the vibe of my book, and I also think it’s the most striking if it ever makes it into physical bookshops one day. I can’t wait to share it with you soon and explain my thought process!

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