Creating the cover for Fragmented Echoes sometimes felt like piecing together a puzzle where every fragment fits, but it doesn't seem quite right, you know? Luckily I like puzzles. Today, I want to share with you briefly how this visual representation came to life.
The colour scheme was honestly the easiest part of the process. Light and dark, calm and chaos... that screams "blue," of course! Well, to me at least. But the cover needed more than just a colour. From the beginning I knew the cover needed to have some type of fragmentation to match the poetry inside, but not a sharp edged kind of fragmentation. Not everything is sharp after all. Fragmentation can be soft and organic. Full of quiet beauty even in its disarray, mirroring our own minds and lives.
And so at the beginning I figured I'd use something like a splash of colour, droplets breaking free from it.
First draft:
But that wasn't quite it. At that point I let it go, and started to focus more on the poem themselves again. At one point I was just playing around with a silly poem about a fox when it hit me, nature! Get it? Fox > nature > flowers. My favourite flowers are of the lily variety and I've tried to showcase those, although not everywhere. So yes, nature are flowers. And flowers are strong but delicate as well. Just as what I'm trying to portray in my collection. There is strength in delicacy.
The Fox's Trail
Beneath the moon's soft and silver veil,
The fox moves swiftly, without fail.
Through brush and thicket, quick and sly,
A flash of red, underneath a blue sky.
The forest holds its breath in awe,
It's nature's draw, its silent law.
The fox's tail, a fleeting sight,
A bopping dance in moonlit night.
So I started to play around with leaf shaped and small flowers. Which felt more fitting already than the ink/water splash. And still not quite there. Well back to the poetry? No, not yet. Or maybe more accurately, not immediately. I had just written something with the title fragmented, which got my brain going. And I quite quickly settled on Fragmented Echoes as the title.
Fragmented Echoes. Of course that title needed a font style that fit. Let me tell you, that wasn't easy. How do you turn something broken or different into a cohesive layout? In the end I settled for using a couple of different fonts and editing them myself to fit my vision. And as a bonus, it circumvented any licensing issues, even though I bought the rights to use them commercially. better safe than sorry, right?
Anyway those also underwent some changes, not as many as the image but still, some decent work was done on them. At this point I've had been at it for nearly a year I think, at least 8 months anyway. And back into the forgotten corner it went. Until New Years Eve, when I suddenly felt the urge to complete at least one project in 2024.
(Spoiler: I already had finished projects but my brain decided otherwise.)
And since we had no visitors over anyway I could actually spent the entire evening working on it. Did I finish it in 2024? Well I thought I did, until I noticed some flaws the next day. But yeah, anyway, that's the gist of how this cover came to be.
Final:
Now that you know the story behind the cover, I would love to hear what you think of it. Did it change your opinion from when you first saw it?
Does it reflect the themes you’d expect in Fragmented Echoes? And what do you expect from Fragmented Echoes as a whole? Let me know in the comments below or let's chat about it on Discord.
- Sofia
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