As I wrote in last year’s blog…it is very difficult to decide on the book cover. After all, the book IS judged by the cover. Maybe you buy the Quilt National book every time for your collection of Quilt National books, but I can’t bank on that. I have to make an appealing cover to convince someone to first, pick up the book; second to look at the back cover and third, to browse through the book to see if they want to buy it. Sometimes I only get the first of the three (if the cover appears in a catalog or online) and so the pressure is great!
We-myself, my graphic designer and Kathleen Dawson, the director of QN- tried to pre-select possible quilts that we thought would make great covers. As I said, we didn’t want a turquoise one so it would look different from the last book. We didn’t want to feature one artist too often. We wanted a colorful cover so a black quilt would be out/sorry to the most gorgeous black quilts I’ve ever seen (but it did make the back cover)! And the same for the all white quilt- but it did make fantastic end papers for this book!
The choices were photographed and then they were cropped and put into mock covers for all of us to see. We tried the Best of Show as we thought it deserved a cover but it didn’t work well due to the many small pieces. It was very difficult and there was no consensus on the first round so more had to be created/much more than the 3, I initially wanted to have!
Please note that this blog is very difficult for me to write because I don’t want to hurt any of the artists’ feelings but I thought it would be interesting to explain our process…which is totally objective. All the quilts are remarkable works of art but we three had to give it our best educated opinions and ONLY pick ONE!
One of the quilts that wasn’t suggested, but I thought looked terrific, with high graphic impact was this oil rig, however I was outvoted.
Without commenting on why these did or didn’t make the cover, because frankly I don’t know all the reasons, I am showing you what we had. YOU be the judge! Let us know if you agree with our final selection or if you have a strong opinion on another cover.
It was not easy to get a consensus and there were others involved, but we were all very happy with our choice of Marianne Burr’s, Through The Lens. We liked seeing the hand-stitching close up, the transparency of the fabric and the colors with the lime title band plus the pleasant disc shapes and it was unique from past covers.
So, after finally deciding on the front cover, we had to then work on the BACK one!
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