Designing a Cover Meta-Cognition for When I was Cool

The story I read was very complex, and had lots of different parts to it. I really wasn’t sure what to do for a cover that would tie it all together, but when I started thinking about it, Sam had 2 main problems. He couldn’t get a girlfriend, because there weren’t any other students in the school, and he had all the Beats going at his throat, making him do their work. So I decided a cover that would depict that best would be a woman on one side, turning away, Allen Ginsberg on the other side, shoving papers at Sam, who was in the middle, with his ears blocked, closing his eyes to it all. I chose the font for the cover, because I thought it seemed slightly kid-like, but at the same time it was something an adult might use as well. That is pretty much the stage that Sam was in. He was more than a child, but couldn’t fully find his adult self. The woman on the left side of my page is what I imagined Carla, the girl he sees for awhile, to have looked like. It also bears a resemblance (in my mind) to Anne. In the pictures I saw of her, she was always wearing a button down shirt, and wore her hair long. On Sam’s desk, there are a bunch of papers and books, and one paper in front of him that doesn’t have anything written yet. That paper is his own poetry. He helped a lot with the poems of Allen, and Bill, as well as helping a few others, but he hardly got a chance to sit down and read his own poetry. I had a few reasons for depicting him blocking his ears. One is because for awhile, he turned away from the Beats, and their school, in order to pursue Carla. It was as if he were blocking his ears to their teachings. Another reason is that before he came to the school, he had his ears blocked to the human-ness of the Beats. My final reason was that he grew tired of the Beats’ antics after awhile, and was unsure why he was even there. But he did stick with it, which is why he is sitting at the desks. Desks are kind of like a prison, but at the same time it’s your choice to sit there (relatively speaking.) So Sam is at the desk for that reason. I feel like I captured at least a large chunk of the book’s themes. There were many aspects to the book, but these were most reoccurring.