The Temple of the Exploding Head

At last, the cover for Book V, The Temple of the Exploding Head is complete!!

"The Temple of the Exploding Head" by Carol Phillips

Now, for the difficult part–lettering the cover. Creating cover lettering is harder than you might at first think. What looks good, what doesn’t, it’s all very complicated. As The Temple is part of a trilogy, we wanted to keep with the style of the two previous books in terms of font, and general positioning.

The problem with Book V, the title is much longer than the others including spaces and letter kerning it takes up a fair amount of room on the cover. The artwork by Carol Phillips is also the most manic and “In Motion” of the three and we want to be careful not to cover up too much of that beautiful art with words–we certainly can’t cover up the Horned God. Finally, you also have to avoid the gutter and tear-off areas of the perimeter as well, further reducing the usable space to put the letters.

My thought was to place the lettering below the Horned God’s hooves, thereby covering up the mosh pit of worshippers. Carol was appalled and fought to keep them uncovered, besides, the other two books had their lettering in the upper quarter of the cover and Book V needed a similar treatment.

Carol Phillips was able to block-in the lettering at the top of the cover, giving it a similar look to the first two books in the series. The coloration for the lettering should be bold, but not garish–something that pops out but doesn’t detract from the cover. I sort of like the “pop” of the red, but also like the somber black.

As usual, I like to hide my name on the front of the cover–it’s a quirk I have–I hate seeing my name on the cover.

copyright 2011, Ren Garcia and Carol Phillips