Book Cover Clone: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

As an exercise in color and formatting, I decided to try to clone the cover of one of my very favorite books: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. I admire this particular cover for a few reasons. First of all, I love its simplicity and balance. I also think the drab color pallet and the no-nonsense-table-of-contents cover is very fitting for Salinger's concise style of writing. No bells and whistles, just engaging characters and commentary.

To make this a real exercise in coloring, I didn't use any color-matching utility in Photoshop or Illustrator. Just my own two eyes and a lot of fussing.

Pictured here is my own, well-loved 1964 edition of the book, next to my finished clone:

The hardest part, aside from matching the colors, was finding a suitable font to use. I finally settled on Georgia, since it came closer than any other I found, and I wasn’t about to design a new typeface just for this pet project. I started with Georgia and tweaked each letter to match – with reasonable fidelity – the original typeface.

Maybes sometime I'll go back and add the publisher's line in the upper left corner, but I didn't feel like it a the time.

Not perfect, but a reasonable facsimile, I think.