A number of people have complimented the wonderful cover design for Anne Spollen's The Shape of Water. It's definitely one of my favorites, and the art came from one of my favorite illustrators, Ken Wong. We first worked with Ken's art on the cover for Epoch by Timothy Carter, where we commissioned a demon from Ken, and one of our designers, Lisa Novak, put together an incredibly clever and irresistable final design. For The Shape of Water, we just plain got lucky. Lisa and I were looking through Ken's portfolio and we came upon the girl-with-the-fish image (Ken calls it "Blue"). I don't think we could have dreamed up a more apt interpretation of Anne's Magdalena if we tried (and at the time, Anne's book was called "Fish Dreams," so this seemed really right). It's kind of eerie for me to imagine that Ken and Anne were working on simultaneously and independently with such similar imagery.
Covers happen in all sorts of ways, and some process are more circuitous than others, but this one was smooth and the result is simply awesome.
4 comments:
So then, in this case, we can judge a book by its cover?
Seriously. This cover is so gorgeous, if I saw it on a table in a bookstore, there is no doubt I'd pick it up. Amazing story of how it came about.
(Yes - the deleted comment was mine. Apparently I need more than one cup of coffee before typing these days.)
I saw this cover earlier and thought it was gorgeous -- and so funny about it being a piece of art BEFORE the novel. They're talking it up over on the blueboards as well, so I thought I'd better come in here and add my "oooh" to the pile.
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