So… we’ve seen a few things about laying out my book here, here, here, and here with emphasis on
how the paintings were cut-up and put together on the pages.
But what about the cover?
This was version 1 of the cover- lot different from what we ended up with (which I’ll show you shortly).
I showed it around here and there and one response I got was, um it’s a picture book- how about showing
some pictures on the cover so the kiddies (and their parents) get that right away!
And, well, they had a point. It’s also incredibly red and orange. Originally as you can see, it had little doodles in the
background like the borders of the pages themselves.
So version 2:
A little different, right? I had the idea of showing the paintings as just line drawings inside the words, so I made the words bigger.
Then I decided to make the words “Get Around” bigger and “Ways to” a bit smaller to make room for doodles:
Then, we scrapped that idea and decided to use images on the cover and shrink the type a bit:
Getting close to how it ended up looking! Still have the doodles in the background, but I’ve moved the series
title up top and removed the shadow on it, and I added a little green top and bottom border to offset the orange.
It’s still the same color orange, but since there’s much less of it, it seems subtler.
Final cover image:
Big difference, right?
A little white outline on “Mike and George’s” and one very important change- now it’s WEIRD world
of Wackiness. Before it was WILD world of Wackiness.
The title is bigger and all one line and there’s LOTS of images on the cover- Mike really wanted to show the plethora of
ways to get around that we show in the book! I’ve also swapped doodles in the background for words in the background
Lemme tell you how hard it was arranging all those little images on the cover in a way that they all fit nicely and
had a good amount of space around them. Also- I wanted to alternate Mike’s paintings with mine.
My favorite touch is the guy in the inner tube floating along the bottom there and Mike’s round submarine right between
TO and GET in the title.
That’s it for now- see all the crazy things happen to a book before you get to read it!