How to Design a Book Cover: Discourse in Black
By Keith Gilyard
Hello! Welcome to How to Design a Book Cover, a series from A Book Designer’s Notebook in which I walk you through a particular cover design from start to finish. This is a bonus series for paid-tier subscribers.
This week, I’m sharing the process behind my cover for Discourse in Black: Voices of the Self, Let's Flip the Script, and Liberation Memories by Keith Gilyard.
The Brief
When I work with publishers, I receive a creative brief that usually shares a description of the book, technical specifications, potential art direction from the author, and art direction from the press itself. Here’s what I got from the publisher of this book:
This will be a compendium of three of Keith Gilyard’s previously published WSUP books on rhetoric, and the volume will release in the same season as his new memoir, The Promise of Language. The three works being included here are:
Voices of the Self
Let’s Flip the Script
Liberation Memories
There is no need to include images or portions of the previous covers. We’re open to a completely new design that encapsulates Gilyard’s work in rhetoric studies.
Because this book was to be published at the same time as The Promise of Language, another title I designed, the press also suggested I explore a few options that build off of Promise’s cover and some of the unused ideas for it.
