TODAY'S FEATURED POST

My Process for Creating a Book Cover

Miranda Meeks

Today, we're going to walk through the process for creating book covers (specifically mine; everyone has a different method). This one was for Magic Dark and Strange by Kelly Powell, with the amazing help and art direction of Sonia Chaghatzbanian from Simon & Schuster. It isn't so different from my process when creating personal work, but it is a little more organized, fortunately! With that, the first thing I look for when starting a project…

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EVERYDAY ORIGINAL

Perseverance

YESTERDAY’S POST

Image

Luddites, Process, and Friction-Maxxing

Lauren Panepinto

January 22, 2026 - A big part of my job is trend forecasting, and to do proper trend forecasting you have to look beyond your genre, beyond your industry, and all the way down to the collective unconscious. I talk about this a lot in various Muddy Colors posts, because it informs a lot of what I do, and I most recently did a mini-series on Trendcasting around the Neo-Medievalism trend happening. You can read Part I, Part II, and Part III. I've been working at Orbit Books for 17 years now, and the most important trend I watch swing back and forth is the pendulum between Realism and Abstraction. In the early 2000s the art trend was all photorealism and CGI. We strove to make fake things look as real as possible in film, on book covers, in…

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Muddy Colors is a collective of more than 20 artists, dedicated to providing a free, online resource for aspiring and professional artists alike.

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