Our Stories: Past. Present. Future.
This anthology of work by the eleven authors of the Native Authors program covers the gamut: poetry and prose, but also a screenplay, personal diaries from the future, essays, stories, and reflections…
Formatting this into a cohesive set, creating the cover, and assisting with the production was both a pleasure and and honor.
Selections from the book
To show all of the formatting gyrations would have required reproducing the entire book here! But the key consistency elements are the running header—which I placed high to accommodate the poetry and the clean traditional typesetting.
This allows the design to fade into the background, encouraging the writing to take center stage and shine!
A running footer balances the layout, providing a concrete visual frame without distracting from the content.
Reflections from the Cover (Re)Development
The nature of a project such as this, with many moving parts and a variety of stakeholders, was one of flexibility in my workflow.
The publisher, Black Bears & Blueberries Publishing, with whom I’ve worked many times, was leaving artistic direction to the program’s host, All My Relations Arts and the editor. In turn, they gave the illustrator full creative freedom. I provided a preliminary layout to convey the available space and guide the art.
Now, full creative freedom sounds nice, in theory. But in reality, some guidance and art direction are required—even in this case where the illustrator is also one of the authors, and so is deeply enmeshed in the goals of the program.
I could tell immediately we would have some problems—the background trees were too contrasty to allow a legible text overlay, and it seemed we would run into issues on the back cover once the full content was added.
I also had my doubts about the aesthetic. By this time, I had started to work with the interior content, and this child-like sense of whimsy—lovely as it might be on a children’s picture book—did not seem to match the tone of the content.
But still, I tried to see if it could work…
Ultimately, I had to put my art direction hat on and try to guide the process toward something more appropriate to the hard-hitting nature of the content.
Thankfully, Chloé took this in stride and provided a dramatically different concept. With some slight tweaks (so the title wasn’t so crowded), I was able to adapt this to work beautifully to set the appropriate tone. Title typography was carried through to the interior story titles, creating a unified, dignified, and appropriate presentation.
Illustrators and designers do not have the same mindset, and at times our goals might seem to be at odds. Nevertheless, we were able to work together to find something that addressed the needs of the readers and the authors.
