Happy 4th of July! I'm spending the balmy holiday going through draft after draft of re-design for the Sounds & Seas cover. The new run will not have hand-printed covers (workhorse though I consider myself, hand-printing +1,000 two-color two-sided covers on a proof press just isn't going to happen), so I get the genuinely fun task of reconceptualizing the jacket design. I started doing this partly because the Xeric folk needed a thumbnail of the cover for promotions, partly because it's fun, and partly because what I'd planned to do today--write and assemble the Diamond proposal--is a little overwhelming.
I went through other drafts with more nautical colors, but I so love the warm off-white paper that the body pages are printed on that I went with this warmer palette. For the final version I might do a new drawing for the cover so it's big enough to wrap-around (this illustration is pulled from Vol 1), and some things might shift as I think about the spine, but I think it's pretty ok otherwise.
Anyway: thoughts?