Before "indie publishing" had a design industry around it, best-selling young-adult author Anne Eliot was proving the model — and her books needed covers and interiors that could stand shelf-to-shelf with the big houses' output on Amazon's most competitive pages. The engagement covered the full run: cover design art-directed closely with the author, InDesign interiors built for both print and Kindle, audiobook cover adaptations, and design support as the titles were translated into more than eight languages.
Genre book design is typography under commercial pressure: a YA cover has about a thumbnail's worth of attention to communicate tone, age band, and heat level, and the interior has to disappear entirely for a reader who will finish the book in one sitting. It remains some of the most honest typographic work in this portfolio — judged nightly, in sales numbers, by teenagers.
