I’ve been getting a lot of (mostly) positive comments about the cover of The Dark Side of Disney, and it even won an award! But there’s one homage my designer and I snuck into the cover that still makes me giddy whenever I look at it.
Here’s the cover:
The Dark Side of Disney Cover
If you click on the picture and look carefully, trying as hard as you can not to be distracted by the gorgeous and talented Draven Star, you’ll notice that the cover is distressed, like someone has been carrying it around for a while, just like a person would do with a travel guide. It has wear marks, scratches, and creases.
I knew this effect could easily be created in Photoshop if I could just get a picture of a distressed book cover to overlay onto the final artwork. I looked all over the place for some stock photos of distressed books, and came up empty handed. And then I realized, “Duh, I own a shit ton of books, and they’re all in various stages of distress. I should just scan in the cover of a book I own!”
My designer, Pentakis Dodecahedron, thought this was a great idea, with one caveat: the cover of the book I chose had to be mostly solid, with minimal text or pictures. Most book covers are anything but simple, with pictures and flashy type all over the place, so Pentakis figured I’d have a hard time tracking down a cover like this. But the second she told me her demands, an image flashed into my head. An image of a book that I’d carried around with me all year in 11th grade. A book whose cover was worn by years of reading and re-reading, and whose content certainly inspired my outlook on life at the time, and thus inspired the adventures that led to The Dark Side of Disney….
A Very Distressed "The Catcher In the Rye"