Design

It's always such a treat to get to bind for kagehina! This is a fic that spans many years of the boys' lives as they come together, fall apart, and come back together again, and I wanted to convey that feeling of movement across both physical space and time. Upon reading the summary and looking at the materials and artwork versteckt kindly provided (I now understand the relief visual artists feel when someone provides references LOL), I went for a design based on a few things:

First and foremost, littleskrib's gorgeous artwork for the cover! (full piece linked here). Designing with artwork this stunning makes the process both easier and harder, because on the one hand it makes literally anything look beautiful. On the other, the pressure is on to do it justice! It's such a gorgeous piece <3

For the layout, I took a lot of inspiration from Porter Robinson's covers from his Nurture era, and combined them with the more gentle slopes of Olivia de Recat's closeness lines. I chose Porter's album art as inspo for reasons I'll get to when I discuss construction, but I also really love this album and its sense of melancholy and rumination; I thought was fitting for the fic.

3. Letters! Letters play an important role in the fic, so I leaned into that as well in the design. I found some really great letter assets and went to town with the chapter headings:

One of my favorite details is the "reviews" section! I asked versteckt to send me some of their favorite comments and I had a field day arranging them on the back cover. My only regret is that I didn't get to add all of them--they were all so lovely!

4. Orange/blue gradient! And of course, it wouldn't be a kagehina fic without some good ol' color coding :3 One of the things I love about them is how much of a constant they are in each other's lives, even when they aren't physically in the same space--again, that sense of spanning distances, movement, two ends of the same spectrum. To that end, I stuck a gradient everywhere I could lol--the cover, the endbands, the endpapers. My favorite instance of this is probably the endpapers, which I handpainted with watercolors and pastels and sealed with an acrylic spray! I haven't gotten messy with paint/pastels like this in a long time, so I had a blast :D

Construction

For this bind, I chose 3-piece Bradel construction! It took a bit of puzzling to get all the pieces aligned--I don't have a wide-format printer, so I knew I had to get creative with the design if I wanted to do a full-cover spread at the half-letter size. (I've done full cover designs before, but at smaller sizes, and when I do print covers at the half-letter size, I usually have to split the design at the spine). As mentioned earlier, part of my decision to use Porter Robinson's album art as inspiration was due to the art's inclusion of winding lines, but the composition of the artwork also played a part. The way the designs are so distinctly separated into a "lines" section and a "photograph" section let me make something that was visually cohesive across the entire cover, while still allowing me to work within my size limitations.

(some initial sketches vs the final print, heh)

I also learned a fun new trick to printing on smaller pieces of printable canvas! I just kinda,,,taped the spine piece I wanted to print on onto a sheet of printer paper and sturdy cardstock lol:

And one last little touch--versteckt mentioned how they'd been burning CDs of playlists for this fic and for their ongoing podfic, and I've recently learned how to include CD pockets in my binds! So in they went :3

Ending Thoughts

Gosh!! There were moments I definitely got stuck trying to wrangle everything I wanted for this bind while still working within my limitations, but in the end, those limitations forced me to stretch my design chops further than I would've without them! A comforting case of "many such cases," I believe :3

And of course, none of this would've been possible without versteckt! Thanks again for for bidding in my auction and trusting me with your story--I had such a good time binding it <3 Here's the link to the fic one more time, for the road!