Title: the vast and glorious power of christmas lights (book cover)
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: G for the art (the story is PG-13)
Artist notes: I was so inspired by these fake book covers that I thought I'd try my hand at it. This is for my story the vast and glorious power of christmas lights (at AO3), the warmest, fluffiest OT3 I've ever written.







Behind the design:

I really wanted to set this cover more obviously in Portland, Oregon, because the story itself is so firmly grounded in space. But I couldn't find a way of doing that that didn't feel cluttered to me. So I ditched the idea.

On a thematic level, the story is about learning to believe that good things aren't just something you see sometimes from a distance, but they're something that can belong to you. There are several scenes of people walking away from offers of intimacy. Which is how I ended up with a figure walking away, and the cupped hands.

There was a piece of graphic art advice in a TED Talk that I can't find right now to link to (eta: Chip Kidd), where the designer mentioned that his first teacher told him that you could either show the audience a picture of an apple, or put the word on the cover, not both. So there are no Christmas lights actually on the cover, though I went with the spark in the cupped hands. The aurora is my play on "vast and glorious lights," and provides a sense of space that I like.

The text gave me the most trouble, because I knew it would take up a huge amount of the cover unless I made the font tiny. I decided to try it first with large print. The font is [ank]*, an eroded font I thought struck the right balance between uncertainty and readability. I tried a version where the text angled to match some of the lines of the image (the aurora, the footprints), but eventually I decided I liked the scrunched-up curve above. It was huge, and easily covered half of the page, but I liked it.

Then I did a version with the titles smaller... and liked it better. It's a lot of title, but I like the irony of it taking up so little space.