Some of y'all know that, in addition to being a writer, I'm also a graphic designer - in fact, I work for a board game company as one of their artists. But it was creating book covers that really got me on the path to graphic design. I've been making my own covers for as long as I've been writing, and it's always one of my favorite parts of the process. I usually end up creating the cover long before I'm done with the book - sometimes before I even START writing! 😂

The cover for We Gave Our Tomorrows is probably my favorite that I've created so far; it took some thinking out of the box, and as always, help and advice from my brother, who's an excellent graphic designer in his own right. So let's take a look at what went into creating it (and some of my design process along the way, hehe).

Step 1: Get an idea. I love action-style covers, so I knew, more or less, the sort of vibe I wanted. Originally, my thought was to have running soldiers on the cover, maybe with an explosion in the background to make things exciting. I tried looking for stock photos, experimenting with combining pictures - I even attempted using AI to generate a picture of Logan.

(Now, I know some y'all reading this aren't fans of AI, and that's fine! I only use it for picture generation, and I like it because it allows me to get customized pictures that no one else has ever used.)

The problem was that I couldn't really get a good picture that looked like Logan and had a correct uniform. The program I used didn't do a very good job with historical prompts (and it still doesn't, but it's gotten a lot better). Finally I settled on one that was more or less workable, stuck it on another picture of a field in Normandy, then added some smoke and a map overlay in the sky. And . . . I didn't like it.

There was . . . a LOT wrong. Mostly the AI picture which was actually pretty cringy (and, uh, doesn't look like Logan). Plus I didn't like how it looked on the background, or the font choice, or the placement, or . . .

Basically, it wasn't capturing the feel I wanted, and it just looked wrong. So, back to square 1.

Step 2: Search for inspiration. I tried looking for book covers, but most of them were nonfiction and featured standard black-and-white photos on the cover. Not what I was looking for. So I tried movie posters, and that was definitely more of the vibe I wanted! I ended up with a good handful to give me ideas. (Have I watched any of these? No, and I probably never will. But that didn't matter to me, because it was the style I was looking to learn from.)

Something like 1917 or Hacksaw Ridge was what I had originally wanted, but I really liked the style of Windtalkers and Saving Private Ryan. (I also thought The Vietnam War was very striking!)

Step 3: Brainstorm and experiment. After talking it over with my brother, I decided to attempt something like the movie covers. I spent a loooooong time creating AI images for Logan, Parker, Brendan, Jesse, and Patrick to use on the cover. They would go up top, and I decided to use a colorized historical image for the bottom, with the title in the middle (sort of mimicking Windtalkers). I tried a few different photos - soldiers by the Eiffel Tower, a squad investigating a barnyard - before I found the current one with the jeep in the rubbled street. It was actually taken in Italy, but it worked perfectly for what I needed!

As you can see, I kept the idea of the map in the background (behind the guys' heads). It filled in the empty space nicely without being overwhelming. I also gave a slight blur to the background of the jeep picture, so that it wouldn't overwhelm the rest of the cover. The black grunge border around the edge gave the whole picture a nice framing effect and helped cover up the picture edges that didn't align perfectly.

I had to remove the pictures of the guys from the background that AI created, but that wasn't too hard. I used a soft-edged Photoshop brush to mask the bottom so they didn't just cut off abruptly. Parker and Patrick actually didn't have their, um, accessories - I had to add in the helmet and the cigarette, painting in shadows as necessary.

Originally I thought to make the text look like steel, but I didn't like that; the style looked dated and it was hard to read. So I settled on black text with a white glow instead.

Now it's looking more like the final cover (we have our title now!), but there was still one thing missing. I didn't like the big white swath behind the guys' heads; it was too bright, and they didn't stand out enough. Going back to the previous image (the one with Logan's Socks as the title), I realized that I'd had a partly-hidden layer behind everything else that gave the map a greenish overlay. I really, really liked that, so I brought it back and expanded it to cover the whole top of the cover. To make the guys stand out better, I added just a little bit of a glow around them. You'd be surprised at what a big difference such a tiny adjustment can make!

Now that's the cover we know and love!

Don't forget to enter the giveaway! And do be sure to check out Savannah's blog, because she's got two gifts for her readers that I am really interested in! 👀

And check out our other participating bloggers!

H.C. Kingsley's contribution today is another addition to her series of "Aunt Tabitha" letters!

• L.E. Levens
• Addison Crissone
• Sophia McCrary
• Journey Bloomfield
• Emily Brown
• Katja Labonté
• H.C. Kingsley

For the song of the day, I realllllllly wanted to use the D-Day Darlings' song that inspired WGOT's title ("I'll Remember You"), but it's actually not from the 40s, they wrote it themselves. So instead, I'll use their version of "Keep the Home Fires Burning", which has a similar sort of theme!

Make sure to come back tomorrow, because Savannah and I are both sharing about the illustrations in our books! 🫡✌️🪖