Shortly after finishing college, I joined the team at Havok Publishing as a senior graphic designer. Havok is a source of daily flash fiction covering a range of genres, from mystery to science fiction to comedy to thriller to fantasy. Each story is told in 1,000 words or fewer, and every one of them fits within a season’s theme. It’s a fantastic place to submit fiction and gain writing credentials—and even if your story isn’t accepted, the editorial team gives thorough feedback that can help you improve your writing.
While working with other designers on what we call “story covers” for published flash fiction, I was given the opportunity to joint-design season six’s anthology cover, Casting Call, with Teddi Deppner, who leads Marketing.
The initial concept and composition was mine, and Teddi swapped out a few images for higher quality ones. She also reworked the phoenix silhouette I had to make it more unique from some of the other branding of that season. I worked on the lighting (including the spotlight beams, sparkles, lens flares, feather shadows, and textures on the clapboard), and Teddi did the typography.
You can see our collaborative efforts below our final version.
Havok Season Six is available in paperback and ebook formats through Amazon.
You can read free flash fiction every weekday on Havok’s website, or you can unlock the full treasury of stories for only $5 a year.
To submit a flash fiction story, check out their submission requirements. (I highly recommend you write for us—no bias, or anything).
Here’s my initial sketch I sent to Teddi as a concept for the cover:
Teddi was quick to green-light the concept, so I started working with the composition using free stock images. The phoenix was created using some of Havok’s previous phoenix mascots, and this is where I began playing with lighting and textures. I also added the title where I proposed we place it.
Teddi loved the direction it was going, but had access to better quality photos to make the curtain look more like an actual curtain (bless her). She also asked if I could somehow fit the clapboard behind the static Havok season logo and color and light it to fit the scene. The clapboard was a pretty flat graphic, so it was fun to add depth and lighting to it so it didn’t look like clip art. I sent her this version back so she could add in the title, since she’d recently acquired some fancy new typefaces she wanted to try out. Before we called it finished, she also tweaked the phoenix to make it look as if it were bowing to an audience rather than sining.