The Evolution of a Cover
I felt like sharing some images that show the evolution of the POSTCARDS cover before going to bed. This will most likely take me a lot longer than I'm assuming it will...
Anyway - Matt Kindt was my guy from day one. The idea was to have Matt do the cover and all of the interior design so that we can build up to the Pekar/Brabner/Kindt story that closes out the book. When Random House said it was time to think cover, Matt and I had a brainstorming session and he sent me the following thumbs:
Eight designs. My favorite one was #8. I loved how it had that old scrapbook feel I was trying to capture with the book and it lent itself perfectly to the chapter breaks (I'll talk about those some other time). We sent them off to Random House and, well, they sent us back their idea. A postcard on the cover with a comic panel superimposed over it. Here's the mock-up they sent us:
We liked the concept but wanted to make it more inline with the book. Matt and I talked it over and we decided to take Random House's general idea and change it a bit so that the comic panel had an image that partly blended into the postcard but also contained something that obviously had nothing to do with the original postcard. It was meant to capture this idea of artists creating stories from these postcards. Matt went ahead and made the following mock-ups:
As you can see, one of them is an early design for what eventually became the final cover. After seeing the choices I told both Random House and Matt that it had to be the elephant one. For one thing, the postcard was nice and bland - no-one would think there was originally an elephant on that card. Also, Chris Steven's and Gia-Bao Tran's story, "Blue," which was set to open the anthology, centered on Lucy the Elephant. So we had Matt Kindt - the guy doing the last story in the anthology - creating a cover that captured the concept of the book while leading into the first story in the anthology. It was the way to go. We wanted to make it more exciting, though, so Matt changed it around a bit to give us this:
Interestingly, Random wanted to see one that was a bit more rendered and tranquil so Matt did this one:
After a bit of deliberation we went back to the livelier one and Matt tightened it up to give us the cover we all know and love:
And that's how it happened, folks.
Anyway - Matt Kindt was my guy from day one. The idea was to have Matt do the cover and all of the interior design so that we can build up to the Pekar/Brabner/Kindt story that closes out the book. When Random House said it was time to think cover, Matt and I had a brainstorming session and he sent me the following thumbs:
Eight designs. My favorite one was #8. I loved how it had that old scrapbook feel I was trying to capture with the book and it lent itself perfectly to the chapter breaks (I'll talk about those some other time). We sent them off to Random House and, well, they sent us back their idea. A postcard on the cover with a comic panel superimposed over it. Here's the mock-up they sent us:
We liked the concept but wanted to make it more inline with the book. Matt and I talked it over and we decided to take Random House's general idea and change it a bit so that the comic panel had an image that partly blended into the postcard but also contained something that obviously had nothing to do with the original postcard. It was meant to capture this idea of artists creating stories from these postcards. Matt went ahead and made the following mock-ups:
As you can see, one of them is an early design for what eventually became the final cover. After seeing the choices I told both Random House and Matt that it had to be the elephant one. For one thing, the postcard was nice and bland - no-one would think there was originally an elephant on that card. Also, Chris Steven's and Gia-Bao Tran's story, "Blue," which was set to open the anthology, centered on Lucy the Elephant. So we had Matt Kindt - the guy doing the last story in the anthology - creating a cover that captured the concept of the book while leading into the first story in the anthology. It was the way to go. We wanted to make it more exciting, though, so Matt changed it around a bit to give us this:
Interestingly, Random wanted to see one that was a bit more rendered and tranquil so Matt did this one:
After a bit of deliberation we went back to the livelier one and Matt tightened it up to give us the cover we all know and love:
And that's how it happened, folks.