Hi, welcome to Office Hours.
I'm Chris and this is what I do at HarperCollins.
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I make book covers.
I work with artists, illustrators,
other designers to bring together their talents and
my talents to create this package that winds up in your hands.
I'm usually spending my day on Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator.
Make lots of notes.
I have my handy-dandy Post-Its.
I have a huge stack of Post-Its because I actually use every single
one throughout my day.
Like to make my schedule bite sized onto each one.
So, you don't know how satisfying it is just to get it and crumple up and
be like, did that.
60% of my time is spent sifting through Pinterest or Instagram to gather
all these different pieces from these artists so that I can bring them together
into presentations to see if they might be a right fit for our covers.
I love looking for new artists to pitch for our titles.
When I'm not designing for work, I'm still usually on the computer.
One of my favorite programs is Adobe Illustrator.
And I love to illustrate and create little side projects myself.
I think one of the best pieces of advice I've had was,
you need to fuel your creative work with your own creative work.
And that's really an outlet for me.
I have a lot of fun with it and
I'm able to learn new things about the programs that I'm working in.
And then I usually am able to carry everything that I'm learning
outside of the office back into my projects or work.
I have so many projects that I've worked on that have been such a amazing
opportunity.
Charming As A Verb, The Secret Life of Sam, Crown Chasers, Felix Ever After.
I really loved being able to be a part of that project,
one working with Alex Cabal and Kacen Callender to really bring together
something that showcases the LGBTQ community.
I also really enjoyed working on Witches Steeped In Gold.
We got to showcase these two badass witches on our cover.
And bring together these portraits with these 3D elements to
create something really beautiful for our end result.
This over here is my design library.
It's just great to take a break from having to look at a screen all day,
and if I'm feeling stuck on a project, and I wanna just take a different look at it,
I'll come here and just have a look through some of these books.
It's a lot of great reference material to pull from.
And I feel like a lot of the times, you might see something
being used differently on page than you do on screen.
And it really helps to pull together these little accents or
specialties to make a book cover stand out.
A really exciting aspect of my job is reading through these manuscripts for
future book titles and trying to figure out what might make an exciting cover.
I was able to pull some manuscripts from the server.
And I usually just put them onto my Kindle, and
I'll be reading them and enjoying every word.
[LAUGH] So I'm getting down to designing a jacket right now.
I have a very interesting process when it comes to doing design work.
I like to think along the terms of Bob Ross, oftentimes.
I'll talk to the book jacket, I'll ask it what does it want?
What are you trying to be?
I always get butterflies in my stomach whenever I start a new jacket because
it starts off as a blank canvas.
Sometimes I'll just have the jacket up for a day, keep coming back to it.
Maybe there's just slight things that when you're in design mode,
you don't really see.
A lot of the times, I do this thing where I'll back up from my screen and
then I'll just look around, squint at it, squinting helps a lot.
Squinting and blurring the lines,
you really get to see what you notice the most.
Every book is a new opportunity.
That's where the fun of it all is, is you really can push yourself every single
time, you try to make a new beautiful piece of art for the cover.
And it's just really rewarding to be in a space where so many people pour so
much effort and excitement and joy into these beautiful books.
I can go into ten different stores in one day and
not get tired of seeing the same book in every store on different shelves.
It's just a really gratifying experience.
If I were to offer my advice to someone who wanted to pursue publishing,
book design, I would really say a lot of us are too nervous a lot of
the times to go after things that really make us happy.
But really just put yourself in that position where you are going after
the things that you want.
Be excited for things, people love excitement.
I am excited talking about what's making me excited right now.
If you go into the mindset of really sharing,
that'll really make a big difference in your life.
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