Laura Montgomery’s Website

Laura Montgomery is many things to me.

College roommate from days of yore. Friend. Fellow writer. Cool lady. First reader. Talented science fiction author.

I could go on. But within the compass of this blog post, she’s a client! Because she hired me to revamp her author website.

As many of you know, I love playing with graphics and will seize any excuse to do so. Thus I’ve created many a bundle cover, covers for my own novellas and shorts, and even the occasional book cover for a friend.

Laura has seen most of my portfolio, so when she decided her website needed an overhaul…she hired me to do it. (A website is a bit too large of a job to do just for the fun of it—although it is fun. For me.)

I think it turned out really well (pleading guilty to bias), so I wanted to show it to you!

Here’s a screenshot of the Home page. You can click on the image, if you’d like to go visit the real thing. Laura’s a space lawyer, so her blog is an intriguing blend of space law, space colonization, and science fiction. Go look! I’ll wait. 😀

Don’t you love the art?

It’s from the cover of her latest release, Long in the Land. Isn’t the site itself clean and inviting and harmonious? It’s built on the theme Lyrical.

I could gush about all the things I think are cool about the site…but I won’t! 😉

Instead I’ll show you a screenshot of a blog post page. Clicking this image will allow you to see it at a larger size, large enough to read. Although…if you’re interested in reading the post, go visit her site!

Cool, yes?

Okay, I’ll stop blowing my own trumpet. 😉 But I can’t sign off without talking about Laura’s books!

I’m a fantasy writer and a fantasy reader, but I also read in other genres, science fiction among them. And Laura has written two of my favorites.

Here’s a little bit about them:

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Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Calvin must defend her!

Mercenary Calling on Amazon
 

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FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists.

Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

“Rapunzel”—a short story—has an awesome twist, and it’s available for free. So if you enjoy SF and have a yen to try Laura’s fiction, give it a look.

Rapunzel on Amazon

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For more of my designerly play, ahem—work, see:
Covers, and More Covers
A Boatload of Covers

For more about Laura’s books, see:
LauraMontgomery.com/Books

 

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Cover Design Primer

This summer I attended a publishing workshop. Cover design formed part of the conversation, and I learned some critical details about it. My architecture background and my previous publishing experience meant I was doing a lot right, but I could do better. Not surprising! Architectural design classes don’t include typography and other elements of graphic design.

When I returned home from the workshop, I dove into tweaking all the covers for my stories. I’ll show the before and after versions. I find it fascinating that such small adjustments make such a big difference. But first I want to share a few basics from the workshop. (C’mon! It’ll be fun!)

First, type fonts.

There are six main categories of fonts.

Old Style – Traditional serif fonts that have been used for centuries. They are easy for the eye to follow, guided horizontally by the bottom serifs. They feature gentle transitions between the thick and thin strokes forming the letters.

Goudy, Baskerville, Garamond, and Palatino are examples of old style fonts.

Goudy, Baskerville, Palatino, Garamond

 

Modern – Bold and eye-catching with extreme transitions between thick and thin. They have a cold, elegant look that works well on movie posters and some book covers (but not in the interior of a book).

Braggadocio and Engravers MT are both modern fonts.

 

Slab Serif – These fonts make all the strokes thick, abandoning thin altogether, even in the serifs. Slab serifs have impact, but it’s easy to overuse them, even on a cover. (They are not suitable for book interiors!)

Blackoak, Cooper Black, Rockwell Extra Bold, and Wide Latin are slab serif fonts.

Blackoak, Cooper Black, Rockwell Extra Bold, Wide Latin

 

Sans Serif – These fonts also have no thick-thin variation. They are monoweight. And they have no serifs. They are easy to read from a distance and respond well to variations in absolute size.

Helvetica, Charcoal, Skia, and Impact are sans serif fonts.

Skia, Helvetica, Charcoal, Impact

 

Script – Script fonts resemble cursive handwriting. Use them like chocolate torte. Very sparingly!

Apple Chancery, Brush Script, Gabriola, and Lucida Handwriting are all script fonts.

Apple Chancery, Brush Script, Gabriula, Lucida Handwriting

 

Decorative – These fonts are so decorative they almost become illustration. One letter might be enough!

Zapfino, Desdemona, Herculanum, and Lucida Blackletter are decorative fonts.

Zapfino, Desdemona, Herculanum, Lucida Blackletter

 

Three rules for choosing fonts for a book cover:

Never use more than one font from each category.

That is, Braggadocio (modern) and Helvetica (sans serif) might work well together, but Skia and Charcoal (both sans serif) will not.

Why?

Because the human eye likes patterns to be either exactly alike or clearly different. Similar, but not the same, makes the human eye struggle.

 

Do use two different fonts.

One font – say all Palatino – is overly calm, sedate, even boring.

Two fonts is interesting, but doesn’t overwhelm the eye.

Three fonts (each from a different category, of course) starts to be cluttered and busy.

all Palatino, Desdemona and Skia, Zapfino plus Impact plus Times

 

Use contrast to draw the eye.

Contrasting sizes, contrasting colors, contrasting fonts. You do want to catch the attention of potential readers, right? Compare the examples below.

 

Can you break these rules? Certainly. The instant I learned them I thought of exceptions that work beautifully. But the vast majority of covers that appeal to readers follow them.

from top left corner to bottom right cornerIs there more to typography? Of course. But these foundation concepts are enough to produce surprisingly good design results when choosing fonts. Let’s move on to the overall composition of a cover.

English speakers looking at a page visually enter it at the top left, glide along the elements on the page, and exit at the bottom right. All our years of reading train us thusly, and the design of a cover should support this natural movement of the eye.

 

Four rules for composition:

Proximity – Group related items. Place author and a quote about the author together. Or put a tag line about the book right above or below the title. Don’t dot bits and pieces all over the place.

 

Alignment – Every element should have a visual connection to every other element.

 

Repetition – Repeat visual elements to create cohesion. Color, shapes, line thickness, and font should all be chosen repetitively.

 

Contrast – Be bold, avoid the similar, make elements either the same or very different. I know. I listed this under the rules for font choice. It also goes for design in general.

 

But that’s enough lessons. (Do I hear you saying, “More than enough”? Yes, I think I do.)

 

What did all this instruction do for my own covers? Let’s take a look.

Here are the before and after versions for Rainbow’s Lodestone. The old cover used only one font and a center alignment. It was attractive, but overly sedate, bland.

The new cover adds the font Matura, a script font with a fantasy feel. It abandons the center alignment for an edge-to-edge arrangement that anchors the bottom and “caps” the top. The capital R in the title stretches up dynamically to frame the tag line. And the color of the title and author byline was deepened to better complement the photograph.

 

What about the new The Troll’s Belt cover?

It’s wise to create a visual brand for one’s books, so the fonts Palatino and Matura appear here also. However, the composition of the art requires something other than a straight top cap, although the edge-to-edge reach is maintained. Thus the title frames the faces of the troll and the boy. The author and author tag line are nearly identical in treatment to Rainbow. That’s my author brand.

 

And the new Sarvet’s Wanderyar cover?

My teacher’s exhortation to be bold rang in my ears. I pulled Matura into the title, which allowed me to:
add some energy to the word Wanderyar
create an edge-to-edge top cap that flattered the art
and maintain the legibility of the type.

 

Troll-magic received the fewest alterations: just the new branding elements of tag lines in Matura plus, in the author byline, the dipping J and the underline.

What do you think?

 

For further examples of the design process in action, check these posts: Cover Makeovers, Serpent’s Foe, Hunting Wild, Winter Glory, and Choosing a Tagline Font.

For discussions of cover copy, check Eyes Glaze Over? Never! and Cover Copy Primer.

For how-to pointers on story openings, see The First Lines.

 

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Creating Livli’s Cover

I want to take you with me as I build a book cover. It’ll be fun and interesting, so let’s go! My second novel, Livli’s Gift, will be released soon; watch as I put together its cover.

from art to complete coverThe first step is selecting art. I could commission an artist to create something new. But my North-lands were inspired by the folk tales in the collection East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and I adore the work of Kay Nielsen (who illustrated the stories). So I choose one of his pieces. It was published in 1914 and is in the public domain. It depicts a queen tending two magical plants under cloches in her garden and fits well with the events in Livli’s Gift, as you’ll see when you read it.

I’m not expert at working the scanner, so the color balance of the scanned art is wrong. Luckily I know my way around Photoshop well enough to fix the problem. I bring the art back to black and white, then drop the image into my cover file.

 

 

 

 

I leave room under the art for my name and an author tagline, but the area needs to be something other than a rectangle of paleness. This piece of art calls for a dark foundation, so I fill it with black. I also remove the black frame line at the top of the art, creating a smooth expanse for the title.

 

 

 

 

I know I want the color of the title to match the color of the author name: a bright blue. I’ll need a dark ground for the title to show well, so I create a translucent shadow at the top of the cover.

 

 

 

 

 

I type in the the title and the author. The J.M. Ney-Grimm looks great (grin!), but the title is not “popping” enough.

 

 

 

 

 

I add a drop shadow behind the letters of the title. That’s better! All that remains to be done is type in the title tagline and the author tagline.

 

:: Typing, typing, typing ::

 

And there we have it: Livli’s Gift.

 
Note: The design shown here was created for the first edition of Livli’s Gift. The second edition possesses a different cover.

More posts about book covers:
Eyes Glaze Over? Never!
Building Star-drake’s Cover
Choosing a Tagline Font

 

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