“Beep! Beep! Beep! Imagine waking up to your beeping and buzzing alarm clock.” Ready Set Go! by my husband, Shawn Waller, begins by telling how anyone could begin their day. He then goes on to describe difficulties that an individual with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) may experience. Parkinson’s is predominantly a disease of the nervous system that affects movement, and it primarily affects those aged forty plus.
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Because Shawn is a home health physical therapist serving those of Medicare age, he encounters many patients with Parkinson's. And due to this, he finds himself repeating much of the same information. Since his patients are not the only ones who have PD, he thought that this knowledge could be used to help more people. And so, he wrote a book containing what he tells his patients.
And as all books do, this one needed a cover.
Research
Prior to design work being done on a book cover, research within a given niche must be done. We wanted to see other book covers related to PD. We wanted to see the highest rated books, and we wanted to take note of what worked and what didn’t. We also wanted to see how this book could be different.
Concept
“Making a great book cover isn’t just about making. It starts with understanding.” I believe this principle by master cover artist Peter Mendelsund describes book cover design perfectly. The content of a book affects the concept of a book cover. Since this book is about overcoming movement difficulties, we knew that the cover had to convey this.
When we think of things that signal the initiating of movement, one of the first things that come to mind is the traffic light. The traffic light is positioned at the center of an intersection, and is intended to signal when movement needs to stop and when it needs to begin. In the brain, a neuron does something similar. Motor neurons specifically, receive signals from the brain. They can then send those signals to muscles, and movement begins.
These are the reasons why a traffic signal and a neuron were chosen as the two graphics to feature on the cover of Ready Set Go!. Just as a traffic light sends the signal for movement to begin, a neuron sends electrical output signals to muscles to begin contracting, and thus initiate movement. People with PD have difficulty keeping their movement smooth.
Layout
A book cover is often like a puzzle, requiring many pieces to be put together. In this case, there are the background vectors and colors, and then there are the foreground shapes and text. As a background, the color orange was chosen because it is a vibrant color and fits the theme of Ready Set Go!. Orange is a color that is full of life and expresses movement, which is what this book seeks to aid with. Orange also sets this book apart. When we did our research, a lot of the books on PD were very bland. Even though you can’t judge a book by its cover, sometimes a book will get noticed, and potentially picked up because of its cover. This visual interest is another reason we chose orange.
As far as software goes, to design this cover, I used three of the main Adobe programs.The neuron started off as a photo, so I used Photoshop to remove the background and make it a basic compound shape. I then brought it into Illustrator to create a vector and manipulate the points, creating a stylized shape. Following this, the vectorized neuron was pasted into Indesign to enable me to do minor vector manipulations to get the placement of each dendrite exactly where I wanted. Indesign is also where I completed the remaining work on the cover - background, text, border, and shape placement.
Just as there is more to a man than his face, there is more to a book than its cover. But as you can see, there is quite a bit of thought and time that goes into book cover design. Research, concept, and layout are the three essential parts of a cover design. And besides title and text, concept and color are two things of utmost importance when it comes to the layout. Next time a book cover grabs your attention, stop and think about what it is that makes that particular cover catch your eye.
If you or someone you love has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, this book is for you. It will not only help you learn about the disease itself, it will give you practical ways to overcome many movement difficulties associated with it.
