Mood Board: What Inspired My Book Cover
And the way it came together
Where do ideas come from? It’s an endlessly fascinating question, I thought it would be interesting to try and answer in a column about the creative process called "Mood Board." To demonstrate how I visualize it and hopefully lure some great jewelry designers to be part of it, I am launching the series with the backstory about the cover design for my 2024 book, The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: True Romance.
In publishing, the old adage, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” is not exactly true for art books. Since many publications are bought online, publishers believe the majority of readers do, in fact, judge a book by its cover. A great cover can make a so-so book a bestseller in the category and an average cover can break an excellent one.
I usually just have one point of inspiration for my book covers. For example, I was thinking of the Edward Hicks painting Peaceable Kingdom for my 2020 book Beautiful Creatures: Jewelry Inspired by the Animal Kingdom, which functioned as a catalogue for the exhibit I curated at the American Museum of Natural History. What I liked about the painting was a lot of animals gathered together.
After I explained this to the Rizzoli designer Sarah Gifford, she created many variations until the jewels looked just right around the title. My favorite parts are the colors and the way the animals create a sense of movement.
An abundance of jewelry on the cover is something of a signature for my books and its somewhat unusual. Most jewelry books feature just one masterpiece. But I find a treasure trove cheerful as well as visually informative.
For the engagement ring book, it took me some time to figure out how to bring several items into the cover. I also wanted there to be color to add points of interest around the diamond rings.
Spark of Inspiration
I was thinking about how important boxes are in engagement ring proposals. So often, opening a box is a choreographed part of the question: "Will you marry me?" But a ring box wasn’t the image in my mind.
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