Married in Meade County - Front Cover
I was lucky with this cover assignment. The art direction was to be a large photo with very minimal cover dressing or other graphical elements. It was to be kind of stark in a way, but not bleak, instead focusing on the subject of the photo.
Kimberly Phillips Clothier was one of the magazine and event sponsors so she was kind enough to provide some photos of one of her models that we could use. My editor chose the photo and I went to work. The tricky part came down to listing the sponsors on the cover in an elegant way that did not detract from the subject in the photo. Well...that part was pretty easy. I just kept the logos white with a slight drop shadow and arranged them at the bottom of the cover. I did have to redraw the Meade County Chamber of Commerce logo but that was a minor inconvenience.
The really tricky part was the Title of the Magazine on the cover. The actual title was "Getting Married in Meade County 2022". It's a gangly, "ugh" of a title that was chosen by editorial. It's direct, but it just doesn't flow well. Plus it was unsightly no matter what font I chose or how I laid it out on the cover. It was difficult to frame the woman in the photo because of the angle and how the image was cropped.
I spent the better part of an afternoon a few days before we went to press just working on the title and finding a suitable font. I love and HATE fonts!
I finally had a range of about 10 different fonts so I set them up on the page and presented them to editorial. None of them worked. I thought a font with a Serif would have looked more elegant but editorial wanted a more hand-written or cursive style font. Ultimately a font was chosen for me, it was free to use "as-is" but apparently the free version did not have numerals (hence the "2022" in a different font).
I absolutely HATED the way the title and the font worked out. I was overruled by the ultimate customer (the editor) and we went with it. I like the overall presentation of this cover which is why I included it here, just not the title text.
