Mush by Tara » design

Coronology Cover

Tara — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:03:18 +0000

Coronology is my final design for Etruscan Press this season, and we were lucky enough to secure permission to use one of Malcolm Young’s drawings for the cover. I think it’s an enormously powerful image and was ecstatic to have permission to work with it. It’s such a pleasure to have been exposed to the works of various talented artists for my work with Etruscan. Design is nothing without powerful imagery, and I think this cover design illustrates that fact. Below is the final, full-color image. More information about author, Claire Bateman is available on her page at the Etruscan Press website, as are reviews of the book, which is available for purchase on Amazon.

Jacket Design: First Fire, Then Birds

Tara — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:40:29 +0000

First Fire, Then Birds by H. L. Hix is the latest book I designed that was published by Etruscan Press. This was my first jacket design for a hardcover book. It started as a standard 6×9” but about halfway through the interior typesetting, I realized the poems were crowding the margins to an uncomfortable degree. It took a little longer for the decision makers to recognize the problem, but by the completion of draft one, we were all in agreement that the size wasn’t working. Several drafts and a revised timeline later, we settled upon dimensions which we felt would accommodate the visually stimulating poems that comprise this book. It’s really an anthology, so the book combines a veritable cornucopia of styles and varying designs (all Hix’s work—I simply replicated his designs in the typesetting process). The end result is a 7×9.5” book, affording a much-needed extra inch for inside and outside margins and enough white space to provide requisite visual relief for such demanding content. I won’t comment further on the content since I’m no poet. Reviews are available at Publishers Weekly and on Amazon, where the book can also be purchased.

Below is the completed full jacket design.

The Casanova Chronicles

Tara — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:09:17 +0000

Rather than make a new post, I’m uploading the finished version of the cover design for The Casanova Chronicles here, long past due. More information about this book of poetry is available at the Etruscan Press website, and the book is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

(Previous post about the design process)
This past semester I had the fortunate opportunity to intern with Etruscan Press. My internship consisted of designing a book of poetry called The Casanova Chronicles. Prior to reading the manuscript, I was given an image to use for the cover design, so I decided to come up with some ideas based only on that image before reading the book. I wanted to see if I’d come closer to matching the style and conceptions of my supervisors based on the image they’d chosen than I would if I actually read the book and came up with a design concept on my own. Not being a poetry connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, I thought the plan was a safe approach. (I turned out to be right, but that part of the story comes later.)

The image I was given was a painting called “Flower Gatherers” by Francois Boucher. Not only is this a demonstrative image on its own, I was told that I likely would be unable to manipulate the image in any way, due to copyright restrictions. While that didn’t come as a surprise, it did limit my options with regard to the design. And it further limits my options with regard to what I can show here about the process. Maybe that’s a good thing. Suffice to say that I did manipulate the image—greatly—to ignite my creative spark and get the process started (always, for me, the hardest part). But those were just the warm-up exercises.

Once I got past those potentially creative but otherwise awkward concepts, I was able to work with the image in its entirety, coming up with a few designs that I felt confident enough to share. And because my supervisors had yet to confirm the limitations on image manipulation, I threw a “manipulated” option in for good measure. Below are some of the initial low-res drafts.