Our current computer/photoshop project is for a book-cover design, so I went for the book I'm reading at the moment - 'Mary' by Vladimir Nabokov. He's got the oddest writing style - it's not overtly strange, just mildly unsettling, but in an entirely positive way, his books (especially his short stories) are generally really funny.
I'm useless at designing things from scratch. The whole process from idea to finished product has always been beyond me, try as I might. Which is maybe another reason I took up photography - a lot of the time the act of photographing is entirely reactionary, at least it is for me when I just wander around and find stuff. So I'm generally mystified by designers of any kind, people who can have an idea, visualise it and then execute it. But I'm happy with this so far - it's a little bit of a cheat in that I've used one of my own photographs (of a broken shop window) but I think it's justified. The idea behind it is sort of based on one particular scene in the book where a fight takes place and glass gets broken, and the narrator, Ganin, singles the event out as the beginning of the end of an intense relationship with the Mary of the title. Ganin lives in Berlin and spends much of his time reminiscing about Mary, wrapping the memories around himself and almost cocooning himself in them... I'm still not finished the book, so I don't know if the cover is finished yet either. Or maybe I'm taking it all too seriously...
