Work-in-Progress WIPWednesday Book Cover Art Makeover – FASHION FRENCHIES Cover Makeover: Spine Design before and after

For as much work as I put into illustrating a cover, the truth is that books spend the majority of their lives as a spine. So I didn’t want to skimp here! I wanted the spine to be as cute as the cover.

I took a lot of inspiration from those old Disney VHS tapes…you know, with the character portrait on the side? I knew I needed that. But I wasn’t sure how to organize all the information a reader would need (the name of the series, the number of the book, author, title etc.)

BEFORE

First, it was a hot mess of fonts. The reader-desired info was on there, but not in a beautiful fashion.

Version one of a book spine: there's a lot of horizontal white text on red and a cute French bulldog decked out like Super Dave Osborne (on a blue background).

AFTER

The next day, I thought a little more about how it should be organized, and came up with this:

Final version of the Fashion Frenchies 2 book spine: The author name, cute French bulldog decked out like Super Dave Osborne (popping out of a ring), series name, and series number are oriented the traditional way, while the title is oriented sideways, with little stars surrounding it. The spine is mostly white text on red, except for the series number, which is blue text on white and on a retro-looking shape

Maybe this is only interesting for book geeks…but I’m SUPER PROUD of how this spine design turned out!

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