HOW DONALD TRUMP STOLE MY HUSBAND // Behind The Book Cover Design

When I saw that Donald Trump was running for president it seemed like a joke. I even wrote a couple articles talking about how Trump is a ficticious person invented by Taylor Swift. I also came up with a warning post about playing drinking games during a Trump debate.

I was wrong for doing this this. If my younger self happens to read this post during some time travel phenomina, please listen now.

I should never have joked about Donald Trump in a Medium blog post.

People are getting killed when they mention anything bad about Hillary Clinton, but when Trump is mentioned, he starts to appear everywhere offline and online. There have been no known side affects for talking badly about or mentioning Gary Johnson from my brief (re)search on Google.

All of a sudden, Trump began appearing on magazine covers. Hashtags would be created in his honor, and when I thought things couldn't get worse, I was offered a freelance illustrator job to make a book cover with a cartoon version of Trump.

Let me be clear. I am not against making art based on a celebrity. If someone asked me to make a cartoon version of Jillian Anderson, I would do it in a heartbeat (who wouldn't?). But Trump?!? What if my initial sketches were worse than the real version of Trump? What if I needed correct my revisions of the Trump cartoon that required a throrough search of the millions of Trump images on the Internet?

My psychologist bill would be through the roof!

Well, I curbed these worries and said "yes" to the gig, because I needed the money.

Zena Thompson, author of HOW DONALD TRUMP STOLE MY HUSBAND, gave me an idea of the type of book cover she wanted. It was going to be a kindle book at first, and the length to width ratio was 1.6 with no back cover. Thompson asked for the design to look like a comic book cover.

I've never designed a comic book cover, but I had some experience with simple characters.

My first draft of Trump was a sketch that looked like this.

Then I proceed to make these cartoon drafts.

We started working with number 4.

Part of the specifications for this design included an older soldier with a "heil hitler" salute. Trump was also to be making some strange face which I would need to refine later on.

This is the draft with Trump and the soldier.

The book background was a bit intimidating so I bit the bullet and threw this draft together.

At this point, Thompson agreed that she liked the soldier, but told me Trump would need more work.

I new this as well, since it didn't feel like a version of Trump that I could immediately say, "Eeeek! Yeah, that's Trump!"

After combing through hundreds of images I was able to get a good idea of how I would make the Trump that was accepted as the final Trump.

Trump has an absurd amount of... absurd expressions! I settled on six images and cartoon faces before presenting them to my clients.

Thompson wanted to see different Trumpesque hairstyles, so I researched all the ways the wind has blown through Trump's hair. I slapped together these hair profiles to see which one resonated.

All I needed to do was make a title that would catch peoples eyes. I crafted two versions that reminded me of that graphic the old school Batman TV series used during action scenes.

Here is the final cover chosen for the book.

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