How to Design a Book Cover: The Second Emancipation
The Process from Sketches to Final Cover
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, but here’s a little bit more of a preview than usual for my free subscribers, because I appreciate you too.
This week, I’m sharing the process behind my cover for The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French.
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.
Official Book Synopsis
The Second Emancipation, a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of post–World War II colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana’s revolutionary visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), who emerges as the most significant African leader of the twentieth century. Determined that readers fully understand Nkrumah’s legacy, bestselling author of Born in Blackness Howard W. French newly dramatizes the Nkrumah story—his humble beginnings, his momentous experience in Harlem, his American education, and his return to Ghana in the final years of British subjugation. The language soars as French evokes an entire continent in the throes of liberation and a roiling United States in the Cold War era. In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation is a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.
Art Direction:
This book is more history than biography, but it dances the line between the two.
The idea of his face in the shape of Africa somehow and pan African flag colors.
Author’s name on one line, but big and prominent.
The author initially proposed a collage with Nkrumah in the center and various people around him.
Visual inspiration:
Comp titles:
Notes & Sketches
I begin every book cover design inside my notebook. It’s important to note that for me, this stage begins with what is essentially a brain dump. There are a lot of bad ideas and basic connections that simply must come out of my head in order to make progress.
Here are what my pages for The Second Emancipation look like.
