Roll me in designer sheets

With covers on my mind, and with Deborah Harry releasing a new album, I harken back to the lyrics from Blondie's "Call Me" ("Cover me with kisses baby, cover me with love").

Tonight, Cathleen's editor emailed her the cover design for her book. It is quite beautiful -- a deep blue water background with a boy seemingly floating/drowning/slipping in it. The title letters are in bold white at the bottom, but appear to be fading (or slipping) away. My eyes, however, were completely drawn to the letters at the top of the cover -- cathleen davitt bell, in the same bold white. Hey, I know that name. Cathleen was so pleased with the design, she was simply beaming...it is so refreshing to see her enjoying this process after having seen her deal with the self-doubt and struggle of the unpublished life.

I had no idea what to expect of the cover because, as I have long known, I have very little in the way of aesthetic vision, if any aesthetic sense at all. At work right now I am spending considerable time on creating a new brochure for our program and I am completely dependent on our development director and my staff for the brochure's actual look. Cathleen pretty much wanted to pull her hair out two years ago when we were trying to design our apartment because I had so little ability to not only visualize possibilities, but to even understand ideas that she was describing to me. Luckily, I can make a pretty good omelet and throw a frisbee pretty far, or I'd have almost no measurable utility in this world. Thus, up until tonight, every time I'd try to imagine what her cover might look like, I'd see nothing more than a Harry Potter book with her name on top. It is so unbelievably cool to finally see what the book is (most likely) going to look like. It makes the whole thing that much more real.