General
Design
Editing
Good Friday
Summary
I was excited to have the opportunity to design the cover for Tony Wolk's Good Friday, the sequel to his Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life (cover to the right). It was to be my first published book cover design. Good Friday is an alternate history tale about Joan Matcham who has just discovered that she's pregnant by a man who died ninety years earlier: Abraham Lincoln.
As this book was a sequel we wanted a cover design that would sit well next to the original book (the trilogy will probably be sold in a set when Lincoln's Daughter, the third book, is released). At the same time we wanted to appeal to new audiences and market it with a more sci-fi approach. I also wanted to up the ante and give the cover a suspenseful feel that would have them looking forward to the upcoming third book.
One of the challenges in designing this cover is the sheer number of book covers that already feature Abraham Lincoln. That's probably why the designer of the first cover chose to use a symbol of Lincoln to evoke imagery of him without actually picturing him. After I made numerous designs featuring Lincoln himself that looked too much like a history book, the Design Manager Chris Huff recommended that I do the the same sort of symbolism instead. He suggested that I take a photograph of Lincoln's hat and bed that had been featured on the back of the first book (picture to the right) and "Photoshop the hell out of it."
Since the mechanism of Lincoln's ability to travel through time was mysterious, I decided to go with a misty-swirly effect and I superimposed that on a faint watery texture as "the river of time" was a prominent feature in the novel. I also extended to size of the stovepipe hat to make it more iconic.
Colors
I wanted to evoke mystery, drama, and science fiction in this color-scheme. That's a bit of a tall-order so I started with a red for the sci-fi and a sepia for the drama. The rest just filled themselves in.
