A Friend of All Faiths Client: Michael H. Cohen MuttonFish Point Press, 2005

The cover of Michael Cohen's "multidimensional memoir" features a snapshot of himself that he'd taken on one of the journeys recounted in the book. The use of this photograph was mandated by the author; the design was left to me. I suggested that because the photograph was so obviously a travel keepsake, the photo should not be used as a full-sized image (where it could seem trite) but rather could appear to be a photograph laying on top of a sheet of writing paper, on which his memoir was being written — as if the author had taken the photograph out of his desk drawer to reflect upon it as he thought about what he would write in his memoir. This concept was agreed upon.

BACK COVER	SPINE	FRONT COVER

To convey the concept that the photograph is laying on a pad of paper, blue lines simulating a legal pad were created and a handwriting font for the subtitle and author credit was selected to reinforce the effect. Not wanting to be too literal, and to add some color to the cover, the beach and water is faintly echoed across the paper and extends to the spine of the book (Cohen was digitally removed from the beach for this part of the cover). The fish on the back cover, by the way, is the publisher's logo. The title of the book glows white where it overlaps the sky, which conveys in admittedly cliched terms that this book deals with spiritual issues. The squatness of the font also served the spine of the book very well, since the spine of the book was only a half-inch thick and therefore needed to be short. The font for the critic's quote on the back cover matches the font of the title, while the synopsis itself is a simple sans serif font. One of my motivations for making the photograph appear to be an actual photograph was because the quality of the photograph was extremely low, so I wanted a way for any defects in the image to be "accepted" by the viewer as part of the concept rather than thought of as a defect.

The original snapshot provided by the author was taken by one of the earliest digital cameras, which offered extremely low resolution (the blocky edges) and terrible compression artifacts (the bright "squiggles"). Every square inch of the image needed to be touched up by hand to make it presentable. Original snapshot on left; retouched snapshot on right.

Additionally, I altered his shirt to reduce the amount of billowing caused by the wind, because I felt that in the original image he appeared to be wearing clothes that were a size too large. You may need to look closely to notice that in the altered version of the photograph (on the right) you see more of his arm and less of his "billowed" tummy.

Postscript: See a comparison of my cover and a more generic cover that the publisher would gone with if the author had not commissioned me by clicking here.