Sketches: Six Cult Films

Slowly, inexorably, this book became a disproportionately irritating and time-consuming project, and I'm relieved to be finished with it. That said, though, the cover turned out better than I might have expected.

Work on the book dragged on for months and months (and months), so I had plenty of time for thought as to how I might approach the cover. I had only poor quality cover art (see my earlier post), so I needed to keep that reasonably small, and let the cover be defined largely by type, rather than those images. The number "6" seemed like it might be an interesting element to build the design around.

But after a page of design sketches, pragmatism began to set in ― along with concern that I could end up putting a great deal of time and effort into a design concept that would probably never be accepted by the Author. That, and I realized that I had somehow forgotten that the full title of the book was not Six Cult Films, but Six Cult Films From The Sixties.

So off I went off on a tangent that I hoped might be more straightforward, more simple.

This eventually became the finished design, seen below. I was concerned that breaking up the title might make it more difficult to follow — or, to be honest, easier for the Author to object to — or inadvertently change the emphasis (if the second half of the title were at the top of the cover, for example). All the elements just seemed to fit best this way.

You know, I was really expecting much more resistance to this cover design than it received. (If only the rest of the book had been that easy.)