book cover and interior design services
Looking for a cover for your novel? Or need someone to lay out the interior for paper publishing? Drop me a line!
THE OUTSIDE: BOOK COVER DESIGN
Gallery: book cover designs published by Rocket Hat Industries. Includes full illustration and layout by Missy Meyer (That’s Not Right, Grand Theft Astro, and The Authorities) and hand-lettering and layout over illustrations by Len Peralta (Brute Force).
As the in-house designer for our own small publishing imprint, I’ve been able to use a lot of skills:
- Full illustrated artwork in both vector and raster formats;
- Hand-lettering;
- Font selection and pairing;
- Working with other illustrators; and…
- Laying out all of those elements to create eye-catching and interesting book covers!
All of that also happens in several formats:
- Portrait-aligned rectangle for Kindle and other e-book readers/programs;
- Square for audio books and CDs; and
- Full front, back, and spines for paperback books!
While I do love illustrating, often a photograph is the perfect background. Or artwork by another artist! Here are some imagined novels that show how hand-lettering can be used over photos and artwork, by itself or combined with fonts, to make a fun book cover.
Gallery: Examples of full hand-lettering for titles and author names over photos or artwork from other sources.
Gallery: Examples of hand-lettering combined with fonts for titles and author names over photos or artwork from other sources.
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THE INSIDE: INTERIOR BOOK LAYOUT
What does an interior book layout designer do?
- Remove widows: the final line of a paragraph at the top of the next page.
- Remove orphans: the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page.
- Remove runts: a single word on its own line at the end of a paragraph.
- Avoid hyphenation whenever possible by adjusting tracking and spacing.
- Follow industry-standard placement, such as chapters begin on odd-numbered (right) pages, with no page number or running heads.
- Follow industry-standard indentation rules, such as the first line of a chapter or first line after a section break having no indent.
- Balancing margins and gutter width for specific final print sizes.
- Formatting end matter: copyright page, about the author, other books by, special thanks, and more.
- Last opportunity to spot small errors: misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and more.
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If you’re interested in book design services, Drop me a note at my contact form with some info about your project!