Cover Design Process for A Question of Color

This past year I had the pleasure of designing a cover for “A Question of Color” a book by Daniel Cardwell and Corey Blake. The book is Daniel’s life story. He was born in 1950 in Marburg, Germany as Daniel Paprocki. The son of a white German woman and a nonwhite American soldier, he became one of five “brown babies” adopted by a professional African American couple in the Washington D. C. metro area. The book details Daniel’s upbringing, subsequent 25 year search for his birth mother and his choosing to be neither black or white – but to just be American.

This book needed a cover that was as powerful as the subject matter. I started my research by talking to the authors about their vision for the book and what sort of feelings they wanted the cover to generate in the potential reader.

The first attempt, shown below, depicted an American soldier and a German woman abandoning a baby wrapped in the American flag. While I think the overall composition of this first draft was nice, the feeling was not right. This felt more like a fiction mystery novel or something to that degree.

So I stepped back to the drawing board after talking with Daniel and Corey again. This time Daniel felt that the cover should depict a man, possibly his own image, as half black and half white. This idea presented challenges for me, as I didn’t have a current photo of the author in the correct pose, nor could I find a reference photo that was exactly what I needed. I also was having trouble picturing this image in my head. Typically I know how a design concept might look before I get to work on it, therefore I have an end goal set in my mind of how things should come together.

After some digging I was able to find what I needed in a demo copy of Poser 7. Poser is a 3D character modeling application that allows you to create characters with certain physical features, and then allows you to pose them. I believe the original version of Poser was intended to be used for artist reference in life drawing.

So I created an average looking white male and black male (below) within Poser that I could combine into one image in Photoshop.

One problem that I ran into was that I felt these images were so generic or computer generated that they didn’t feel real enough for me. Plus they didn’t resemble the author in any way. Luckily, about this time Dan contacted me with a photo of himself, as a younger man, that he felt could be used in the cover image. So now my 3D models could be used as a base, and the photo of Dan could be overlaid and blended in. The idea was good, but would it work?

After a LOT of adjusting and tweaking I was able to produce a concept that I was happy with to show the client. The approval for this one took longer than the previous concept, and in fact this image was the acting cover for quite some time before it was ultimately decided that the image was too militant in nature.

During another conversation with Dan he presented me with an old magazine clipping (shown below) that featured a photo of “brown” children being brought over from Germany. The child that the woman is holding in the photo is him. Wow! What a great image for a new cover concept. The only problem was that the image was low resolution. I didn’t want that technicality to stop us from using the image. It was simply too powerful and such a perfect fit for the book.

I played with this image extensively in Photoshop, and ultimately decided that the low res, tattered, and grainy image fit the cover and nature of the story perfectly. As long as the the image was clear enough to see the childrens’ faces it would get the point across and set the mood. Below is the final cover image for “A Question of Color”.

The final cover design took considerably less time to create than the previous concepts, but looking back on the project those were necessary steps towards realizing the perfect cover image for this book. I believe, as a designer, you have to take that journey in order to find what works best and what feels right for the face of an author’s story, especially one as powerful as Daniel Cardwell’s.