photo by swisscan on flickr

I stepped off the airplane and followed the signs, in French and English, the way they do things in Canada. The hallway fed into a giant empty room, thick with winding amusement-park railings full of nobody, the booths at the far end staffed with Valkyries, or bored Customs agents, or trolls — who could say? A stamp and I was through. Canada. I was here.

“Your speedometer’s in kilometers first, then miles smaller,” I told Ryan as his car pulled us through normal-looking streets. I could see why everything filmed in Toronto; it looked like any other American city, what with its traffic lights, sidewalks, and correctly-shaped humans. “That means that somewhere, in some factory, there are American versions of cars being made, and Canadian versions of cars being made.”

“The placard is integral to the frame of the car,” he nodded. “The whole chassis has to be re-tooled to fit the appropriate placard.” He put on his turn signal. It sounded like an American turn signal — but was it?

To most Americans, Canada is a concept. It’s a punchline, a hockey-loving moose-preserve with free health care and an infestation of the French. Anyone who professed a desire to “move to Canada” around some election or other clearly saw it only as non-America, as a place defined by its not being someplace else.

“Did you ever hear of the Walkterton scandal?” Ryan asked. It is news that did not make it to America, so busy are we with our own problems.

“No,” I said, and suddenly I realized we were flying.

Ryan moved the steering wheel and the car banked, dipping sharply into the air and describing a large arc across wide-open sky. Before us were the buildings of the downtown core, and beyond that, the twinkle of Lake Ontario; the CN Tower jutted into the sky like a syringe full of nourishing, bagged milk.

It was astonishing. It was beautiful. It was the glimmer of scales falling from my wide American eyes.

“There is so much we don’t know about Canada,” I gasped, and Ryan laughed.

“Sometimes,” he smiled, reaching into the back seat and handing me a brilliant red maple leaf, shot through with veins and shocking and surprising and real — “sometimes, we like it that way.”

When I sat down to design the cover for Return to Wondermark Manor, I didn’t have a clear picture in my mind of how I wanted it to look. So I sat down with some oversized paper and just started sketching layouts with a ballpoint pen.

This is a great technique for unclogging your thinking. I knew I wanted to fill several sheets of paper; there was no sense in leaving any blank space. I didn’t know what I wanted the thing to look like, so I couldn’t call anything right or wrong. I focused simply on filling up pages with as many different designs as I could come up with.

Around page two or three, I started to get excited. Seeing designs sketched out helped upgrade this from some nebulous “project” in my imagination into an actual, physical book. It was starting to crystallize into something concrete. I visualized the designs that I’d drawn as fully-complete covers, as if I were holding the finished book in my hands, and gauged my reaction accordingly. What did I like and not like? Which designs and what visual elements were I responding to?

After I’d filled several pages in a bit of a frenzy, I began to peter out of ideas. That was okay, though; I had a really good start on some interesting designs. I set the whole stack of paper aside for a while.

When I paged through it again a few days later with fresh eyes, one unusual design stood out to me. I don’t know why, but I was really drawn to the asymmetry of the diagonal-slash composition on this page:

That basic layout became the foundation of the final cover. I didn’t follow the sketch exactly, but it gave me a place to start, a ramp to get my motor running. When I do a design project I usually have to start without knowing exactly where it’s going — trying to plan too much ahead of time can overwhelm me, and I never get anything done. But if I just hunker down and start playing around, usually I’ll figure out what I’m doing after a while and then I’m off to the races.

Here’s the final design (click for bigger):

p.s. I tried to work “the sketches popped my creative clutch” somewhere into that whole description, but it sounded dirty so I nixed it