The rooster is a recurring motif in my writing of my father’s life. When the time came to design the book cover, I wanted an image of a rooster on it, but I didn’t want to use a photograph. Since I enjoy drawing and painting as well as writing, I made a collage from my own pencil and charcoal drawing of a rooster singing at full throttle. Printouts of my manuscript provided the black-and-white wallpaper background. I added images of barbed wire and pops of red colour.
Here are two examples of the early mock-ups I prepared:
The cover design team at Rowman’s sourced a black-and-white photo of the concentration camp my father was in. We bounced a few more ideas around and replaced the background printout with an image of my father’s original handwriting. In the early prototype below, the strong bands of red rimmed with barbed wire and the rooster drawing competed with each other for attention:
We agreed that there was too much going on in this design, so we amended it to look like this, the final book cover:
