Hounds of faith and fury

Project Objective

To print and hand-bind a draft of a fantasy novel I wrote, and create a cover that effectively communicates the theme and tone of the story.

Target Audience

Readers of young adult fantasy.

Design Process

Interior Layout

I laid out the entire 90k-word novel in InDesign, using a template for a previous project that I tweaked and refined for this project. I used the Monarcha Book font for all the interior text, and used hand-drawn icons from the cover design for the chapter headings.

Binding the Book

The pages then needed to be printed as book signatures of 32 pages each (approximately 120 pieces of paper printed on both sides and folded in half), which I then hand-folded, hole-punched with a thumb tack, and stitched together with needle and thread in the correct order. The pages had to be clamped and pressed together for several hours in between each stage. Finally, I could clamp the book block together to glue the spine and cover it with a piece of fabric to stabilize it before cutting and gluing book board together for the cover, which I wrapped and glued fabric over.

Designing the Dust Jacket

The cover concept went through several iterations before I landed on the eclipse concept for the final version. I started with black and white sketches that I imported into Inkscape and refined before playing with a couple different colour palettes. The stark black and white contrast was always at the back of my mind and aligned with some of the story’s themes, so that gave way to the final iteration. The only thing that carried forward from the first iteration is the hand-lettered font I designed for the title on the cover.

Design Challenges

The most challenging aspect of the process was aligning the individual book signatures in a book press in order to clamp them in place, and glue the spine together with proper alignment. Second to that, the dust jacket cover design took the most iterations and time to refine, and figuring out the size of the dust jacket for printing took some trial and error, including one reprint.