Wednesday Word: Serendipity

serendipity |ˌserənˈdipitē|nounthe occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way : a fortunate stroke of serendipity | a series of small serendipities.DERIVATIVESserendipitous |-ˈdipitəs| adjectiveserendipitously adverbORIGIN 1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

One of the hardest part of doing cover designs using stock photos is to match what's in your and the author's head with what is actually available.

In Josephine Myles' Stuff on of the protagonists is the owner of a vintage clothing store. When designing the cover for it I looked at a bunch of things I could use in the background without making it look too busy and settled on those dress forms. (They're in the book too.) The new cover for the re-release of Tailor Made--also by Jo--was already on my to-do list, but there was no hurry. Then, looking through tons of photos of men, I cam across of the one on the right. Both the body type and the pose made me think of those tailor's dummies and at that moment the idea to superimpose it with tailoring patterns popped into my head. The result is a perfect fit for the book, but I'm not sure I would've came up with it if it wasn't for those dummies.