Here are the cover design blunders and successes for The Book of Dog, from last to first. I was learning Adobe InDesign along the way. Some of these covers are terrible. I really knew nothing in the beginning either about design or about the software. Some of the covers, I learned, looked good on the screen, but not on paper. The first cover, of Stella and Mary Mbwembwe riding together in a car, did not survive the transition from screen to page.
For this last one I went back to my crafty roots, the same as I had done with the first cover, a cover that I had made from sharpies and post-it notes and cut-out letters from magazines. For this last one I cut some dogs out from black construction paper, in the style of the interior drawings. I laid them out on the scanner glass and covered them with tissue paper for the backing. It made me so happy. Just as I was setting up the scan, my cat walked across the scanner glass. She had been outside in the weeds and she and left seeds and dirt on the glass and I just left it there because it seemed appropriate to the book’s theme, to have some help from my animal.
