Unveiling The Cover For ‘Love Me As I Am’

Finding the right cover design for ‘Love Me As I Am’ has been quite a journey and it proved much more difficult than we originally thought…

We debated the font sizes, type face and colour themes till the early hours of many mornings, and scratched our heads, wondering: What’s the core message that we want the cover to convey? As you can imagine, there were many different opinions and no easy answers.

Then, I stumbled across this Facebook status update: If you judge a book by its cover, you might miss out on an amazing story.

Those words really said it all: The cover must be an invitation to everyone, no matter what their sexual preferences are, to pick up the book and enjoy the inspiring stories captured on its pages… no one should miss out on this experience.

Eventually, just before we signed the design off as done and dusted, Ade looked at me and said: ‘Hmmm, I don’t know… It’s just too perfect… It needs something that shows a flaw… Do you see where I’m going with this?’

My first thought was ‘But it MUST be perfect. I want it to be pristine.’ Then the penny dropped… None of the stories told in ‘Love Me As I Am’ present a prefect life. In fact, it’s the bracing honesty and rawness of the letters and biographies shared in ‘Love Me As I Am’ that echoes the title of the book like a soft cry or an innocent locker room glance… The pages are filled with words of love and understanding, encouragement and reasons to hold on for a better future ahead… Not a perfect future, but a better one.

So, with that in mind, we made one final tweak… then we stepped back, imagined the book in a bookshop’s window and thought: It’s not too far from being perfect, but it most definitely looks fabulous.