The cover takes shape

The House on Summer Street is the story of a boy moving into a new house with his newly remade family. He is on the brink of middle school, and not terribly thrilled by his father’s new wife and her young son. The good news (?) is that the house seems to be haunted.

The house is very clearly described in the book as an old Victorian with a dead willow tree in the front. The title of the book being what it is, one would be hard pressed not to use an image of the house on the cover. Granted that the words and the image would apparently be the same, the words are straightforward and the image can add the necessary air of intrigue to them. A house is a house is a house. A spooky house is something else altogether. So, I had to get myself a spooky old Victorian. I headed over to your friendly neighborhood interwebs.

I looked long and hard for an image that included both the house and the tree, but came up with nothing. Of course, I knew I’d have to Photoshop whatever I came up with, so I separately found, first, a house, and secondly, a tree.





I love that house; I could move in tomorrow. The tree is obviously far from dead, but a little manipulation and I could probably make something of it. I eventually decided, however, that the two together just weren’t going to work. It wasn’t that my ‘shop skills weren’t up to it (although they probably weren’t) so much as my desire for white space as mentioned yesterday, and for keeping the design a rough cousin of Lingo.

So I went to work on the house. I decided I wanted it to look like an old photograph, and before long I realized that I had better tools for that on my iPhone than on my Mac. I dug into Camera+ and iPhoto and Instagram and started playing around. Eventually I came up with this:



This seemed suitably spooky and I put it on the cover like this:



The font looked a little light to me, so I went to this:



I was starting to be bothered that the underlying house image was not one that I owned. Granted, it was virtually unrecognizable, but the VCA knows my feelings about intellectual property, and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean you can have it for free. So I looked through my own pictures and found this one.



At this point, I was thinking that I needed to experiment with a fuller treatment. So I manipulated the photo:



And then I went whole hog:



Then I tried it with the other image.



I wasn’t satisfied with these visually, but more to the point, they were going too far in a wrong direction. To warrant a cover like these, the book ought to scare you to death and scar you for life, and it’s not that kind of book.

So I went back to my original idea, but this time I manipulated my own photograph:



And went back to, roughly, the original design:



And that’s about it. I may tinker some more, but it does capture the sense of the book well enough, and I doubt if my ‘shop skills could do much more than this sort of approach. I didn’t want it to look too juvenile, because although the hero is young and it probably was directed originally at a young audience, it’s not exclusively YA, and I think this fits the bill. In the end, should I have hired a designer? Probably. Can I live with this? Sure. It’s better than that crappy Lingo cover that replaced the gorgeous original illustration. And it’s always going to be postage-stamp size on a page here or on Amazon.

It’ll do.