Evolution of a book cover

Being a designer as well as a writer (as I’ve said more than once in this blog), means the cover was always going to be a very big deal.

I’ve talked a little bit before about how I settled on Falling’s current cover through the context of designing what I hope is a logo that will one day stand alongside the classics, but I recently found a bunch of old files I’d almost forgotten existed that show the evolution of the cover itself.

I did a lot of work to settle on the typeface I used for the title, investigating the word ‘Falling’ in about 100 different fonts;

Then I categorised them into groups with different moods. First was classical fonts with fine serifs, a look that always suits the horror genre some reason – something about stateliness, slight standoffishness, evoking a grand old haunted mansion.

Second was fonts that looked a bit more technical and which I thought might allude to the technothriller elements, although I was pretty sure from the get go I didn’t want to go in that direction. All that stuff (the technology of the near future) wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to call attention to in the marketing because it was never intended to be anything more than a realistic backdrop against which the ghost story takes place.

Third were fonts which were so outlandish or distinctive they encapsulated the aesthetic (scary, violent, malevolent, brooding, etc) within the font itself.

And fourth was another popular choice for horror – that of scrawled handwriting, as if the victim of a monster or killer is desperately leaving a final clue as they bleed slowly out. I called this group ‘The Ritual’ inspired by a book that had made some waves in the genre around the time, The Ritual by Adam Nevill.

So after settling on the current design structure, ie a single photo taking up the top half and a flat, black area with the title in red for the lower half, I experimented with all those fonts;

At one point I reversed the title out into white and had it appear against a diffuse red shape, somewhere between a cloud and an out-of-focus blood splatter;

I went through iterations using all the different photos I’d found of the Sydney Harbour Bridge looking forbidding or malevolent;

And lastly I experimented with something completely different, something that would contain some measure of vague threat with its jaundiced yellow colouring, the bridge fading into a sinister fog and the connotations of what the title might mean, but which wouldn’t give very much away;

Finally I settled on the cover we all know and love. I do, at least;

What do you think, did I make the right choice?