Lynn Andreozzi,director of art and design at Random House, discusses the cover design process for The Art of Taming a Rake by Nicole Jordan.
When Andreozzi and her colleagues cast the model, they didn’t know his character was supposed to be blonde. “A lot of times, the book isn’t fully written,” she says. “It sometimes doesn’t matter. We’ll pick a guy we like and we can change his hair.”
For the final version, Andreozzi had the illustrator tweak the male model’s face, changing the shape of his eyebrows, nose, and chin, among other alterations.
“You see how we added six-pack abs” and removed the male model’s chest and arm hair, Andreozzi says. “We don’t like chest hair. I don’t know why. It’s just a thing.”
“We knew going into this the color scheme is yellow and pink. We had this proof [of Lynsay Sands’s The Heiress, from Avon] and I liked the color scheme.”
The illustrator picked an off-white dress, Andreazzi says, because he knew he could change it easily to pink.
Software like Photoshop enables illustrators to insert backgrounds. Andreozzi recalls the days when she had to rent furniture for historical romance covers and make last-minute tweaks. “You used to have to spend money on props,” she says. “I used to have to rent a Regency-type of couch. Here, you can use anything, as you can see.”
