Growing Into Wisdom and Grace
by Toni Camille Romano

I was delighted when my friend Toni Romano approached me to design a book cover for her memoir, Growing Into Wisdom and Grace. Toni has been a wonderful supporter of my artwork and creativity. Before launching into a design, I take a quick look to determine current design trends. I created a PDF of these covers to show Toni. When we discussed the project, she was very clear that she wanted a spiral in rainbow colors and a simple design as the theme for her book.

From Toni’s memoir: "This morning when I awoke and spent time meditating and processing, I became aware of the fact that I can be resilient or stuck, strong or vulnerable. So I spent some time thinking about what’s going on in my heart, my gut, and my head at this particular time; and where I’m stuck, where I’m resilient, where I’m strong and where I’m vulnerable.

It reminded me of the spiral. Each time something rears its ugly head in my face, and I feel stuck or vulnerable, it doesn’t last as long or feel as challenging." (P. 83)

I made some rough sketches, scanned them, and re-drew them in one of my favorite design tools, Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator's vector graphics seemed a perfect way to get the clean look Toni wanted. I experimented with Illustrator’s built-in spiral tool, but the results didn’t seem quite right. I drew some spirals, experimenting with various types and color choices. We both liked the cone type of spiral the best. We talked about adding a rose or a white butterfly above the spiral, and the Blue Morpho butterfly added a touch of elegance.

For this project, I decided to use Google fonts, as they provide a wide variety of fonts; the fonts are free and open source. A nice feature on the Google Fonts website is that the user can type in words like "Growing Into Wisdom and Grace" and see a preview of how it will look in that font. Plus the font listings have a pairing page that gives suggestions about which fonts work well together. Adobe Illustrator CC has many of the Google fonts already in its library through Creative Cloud. I downloaded a zip file of the fonts I was interested in. Next, I uploaded them to Creative Cloud through the font manager, and then they were available to all my Creative Cloud apps. The only downside I found was that sometimes the fonts were not available when I was offline.

From Toni’s memoir: "In my 85 years on the planet I’ve been involved in many interesting activities and projects. My hope is that the reader is inspired to face life’s inevitable challenges, such as health problems, work and career issues, decision-making, relationships and death of loved ones, with the help of universal principles and time-proven experiential exercises. I’ve read books, enrolled in many self-help classes, and engaged in personal counseling to help me identify the beliefs and behaviors that were holding me back from being all that I could be. Learn how the tools I applied helped me heal from the limiting evangelical Christian beginnings to embrace a new world secured in inclusive Spirituality!"

To order an autographed copy of the book, email Toni at: toniromano75@gmail.com. The published price of the book is $14.95. Locally, arrangements will be made to pick up a copy. For mailing a copy, add $3.50 for book rate or $6.00 for first class mail. E-books will be available at a later date.