The twists and turns of the journey that led to the final design

October 12, 2024 4:42 AM

"At the beginning of the process, Ruby provided a few insights that guided my image research and initial concepts. She envisioned the cover with a comet as the central motif, and also suggested evoking old newspaper headlines from historical comets and cosmic events, wanting to evoke a feeling of mystery, even a kind of haunting. So off I went to scour the internet for paintings, etchings, and illustrations of celestial events, mining the cultural history of comets, as well as contemporary paintings, photographs, and scientific diagrams to see where inspiration would strike."
posted by cupcakeninja (6 comments total)

Meanwhile, the Grauniad seems to think that the silhouette of an aeroplane's contrail is actually a comet with an 80,000 year period.

If they fix this absurdity soon (and I hope they do), you can see the original here.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 6:02 AM on October 12

This was so interesting to read! And it was neat to peek at all those possible iterations and the range of feelings~ they evoke just from variations in imagery and composition. It's really impressive, how much work--how much human effort and knowledge--goes into a really thoughtfully communicative cover.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:23 AM on October 12 [1 favorite]

This article was amended on 12 October 2024 to replace the top image. The original image supplied by an agency did not show Comet A3.

Glad they fixed the article, but it's still nowhere near as captivating as half of the images that went into the production of this cover!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:49 AM on October 12

Heh, I had a weeklong email conversation with the cover designer of one of my books that had similar ups and downs with the theme and what we ended up with was a but far off from the original idea but still a good one nevertheless.

But I sometimes wonder how much the process mattered in the end. A good cover is a good cover. I hope a lot of that journey wasn't just them patiently trying to placate me the author.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:54 AM on October 12

Surely they know the licensing business better than I do but I’m not sure why they were stymied by being unable to locate the owner of the painting—the right to reproduce it would be retained by the artist or whoever owns their intellectual property rights, unless that works very differently for art than I understand. If other of the artist’s work is licensable then I would expect it to be the same rightsholder. I guess it’s also possible that they couldn’t get a good enough image without the original.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:12 AM on October 12

Yeah, it wasn’t explained but maybe all rights were conveyed with the sale? It would be really weird but I suppose it could be done. Them only having small inadequate photos and were hoping to find the original and get it photographed was my other thought.
posted by PussKillian at 5:47 PM on October 12