Emblem Divide – Free serialised book for charity

Here are a few post-its that I doodled on whilst trying to come up with the ED logo.

Well, I posted it up on FaceBook the other day, but I just couldn’t resist adding it here too. Damien, a long time friend and reviewer of Emblem Divide has pulled out all the stops to create this truly awesome logo. We’ve worked on a few iterations of it and I think we’re almost there now. It really is looking fantastic. Thanks Damien for all your hard work.

Though I like the original cover very much, I sternly believe that when I release it, I will redesign it. The graphics and imagery are exactly as I originally intended, but I feel that on it’s own, it doesn’t hold a place against other books of a similar, or even a different genre.

The actual design work was produced using two packages. I used Inkscape to layout the banner, the sword and the title lettering, whilst using Scribus to do the blurb lettering. Why do it this way you ask? Simply because I could not export the drop shadow on the title lettering to a PDF using Inkscape. PDF just doesn’t handle the shadows at all. I didn’t want the blurb text being affect by being rasterised to a bitmap, as the banner et al had to be, so

I took the decision to export the majority as an image using Inkscape, and then to put the blurb text on in Inkscape and save as a PDF. The resulting file worked very well at lulu.com and only a very small imperfection can be noticed in some of the lettering. On the book itself, it looks every bit as good as I hoped and to be fair, though not an outstanding cover, the combination with lulu.com’s great printing has left many people aghast at the similarity to a ‘real book’.

The book’s cover was actually designed and created as a single page. Lulu.com does have a “cover designer” but for my tastes and because I knew exactly what I wanted the cover to look like, this was just not an option. Luckily Lulu.com offer a page showing all of the dimensions you need to work to, whilst designing the cover. During the creation process the text document is uploaded and from this, the size of the spine is calculated. This is then presented to you so you can split the working design page up into back cover on the left, spine in the middle and front cover on the right. It worked flawlessly.

It should be noted here that all of the design work, and the text work come to that, was created using free software. It’s even more of a point to note that the three software packages used, Inkscape, Scribus and OpenOffice, are all available on Windows as well as Linux. I feel really proud of the fact that I could produce everything using free and open source software, something that I strive to do wherever possible.

The lettering was a fairly straightforward choice, being something bold and easy to read. I sacrificed some of the readability to further enforce the presence of a cutting device being present on the page. The letters are cut out of the red banner, with a definite drop shadow behind them, which does make the title a little more difficult to read.

I think personally, the hardest part of the cover to design or collate was the wording on the back, the blurb. I wanted it to be something that would convey two timelines, as this is what the book is all about. I wanted also to introduce two of my main characters, but I also wanted to keep it short and sweet. Not an easy task.

Originally the blurb was a lot longer, but on reflection it really seemed to detract from the minimalistic approach I was aiming for. Several revisions later, and the text was reduced considerably, so much so in fact, that I had to re-jig the layout to get it to look right. I emphasised the split between the two timelines by having each paragraph sit entirely in either the red or white sections.

I decided fairly early on in the blurb creation, to take paragraphs directly from the book. I really felt that this was a better idea, rather than creating text specifically for drawing in readers. I aimed to let the contents of the book be a merit to itself and promote it’s very being. The blurb is included below:

The lecturer began commenting. “Oken Brown. He looks harmless enough but he was one of the most ruthless criminals ever to have graced God’s earth.” Suddenly Zane became interested. “He developed the first hand held temporal weapon, and used it in an underground fighting arena only twenty years ago.”

It wasn’t as if Oken hadn’t killed before, he was an elite member of an underground culture. He was almost like an ambassador of death. Oken was one of the best, but even he shuddered at this new weapon which threatened the very existence of everyone on the planet.

Re-reading it now, it feels a little flat, and given some more time I would have worked through some more ideas. This blog is supposed to be about my pitfalls as well as my triumphs whilst creating Emblem Divide. I can chalk this one up to experience, it’s not a good blurb.

Part 3 – Tools of the trade

Designing the cover was actually pretty fun. I had an original concept in my mind to have a sword, once you’ve read it you’ll know why, resting on the ground, with the camera looking along it’s length, at a slight angle. I looked for a few photos, but none of them really conveyed the sword accurately. I also had this vision of it being drawn and looking like it was coloured with water colours, almost in a wishy washy fashion, maybe dreamlike.

I approached my sister, an awesome fine artist and asked her if she would be able to draw this sword for me. I tried to give as much detail as I could, but my explanations were really vague. Though I had managed to describe the weapon in detail in the book, I left much to the readers imagination. Eventually I managed to find a few photos and images on the net which represented the kind of image I was looking for. I point of fact, we actually changes from the “looking along it’s length” view to a straight top down view as we realised that some of the features were intrinsically hidden by using the former perspective.

I still love the final image which Jane drew for me. It conveys everything that I wanted to express. It’s soft enough to be a figment of an imagination, yet powerful enough in it’s entirety that it portrays the nature of the book right there on the front cover. I complemented the sword with a deep colouring which seemed to me to look rather royal, or regal, giving some weight to the word Emblem. An emblem is a symbol, a sign, an insignia and as such the colour I chose is intended to conjure up those kind of feelings.

The specific placement of the sword and it’s presence offer an explanation of the word divide. A sword is usually used to cut things or two divide them into several pieces. I briefly toyed with the idea of slicing a part of the red banner, but decided this to be invasive and actually much more harming of the original message I was attempting to convey.

Part 2 – The lettering and blurb

The cover image as used to print the first copy Enjoy. If you can’t see the image, follow the link to the original source.