- I.Title & Bibliographic Identity§1
- II.Visual Identity — Color System§2
- III.Visual Identity — Typography§2
- IV.Cover Design Rationale§3
- V.File Naming Convention & Asset Inventory§4
- VI.Asset Specifications — Retail & E-Commerce§5
- VII.Back Cover — E-Commerce Reformat§6
- VIII.Read Sample — Selection & Rationale§7
- IX.Amazon A+ Content Module Specifications§8
Survival
Takes
a Wild
Imagi-
nation
Fariha Róisín
Short retail description: A poet and activist writing, praying, clawing, and scratching her way out of generational trauma — asking who her family is, how to love a mother no longer here, what it means to be Bangladeshi, what is a border. Innately hopeful, resolutely strong. An illuminating breath of fresh air.
The reimagined cover operates in two distinct registers that digital assets must honor: the cover palette (dark, warm, cartographic — saffron and indigo against deep ground) and a secondary light-mode palette for interior/promotional contexts (parchment and ink with saffron accent). Assets derived from cover imagery use the dark palette; metadata pages, read samples, and editorial layouts use the light palette.
— PRIMARY PALETTE (cover-derived, dark field)
Ground#0D0A07Primary bg / night field
Warm Earth#2D1810Land-mass glow / depth
Saffron#D2781ELight source / emphasis
Gold#F0D8A0Title type / primary text
Indigo#4A2870Counter-glow / interior left
— SECONDARY PALETTE (light-mode / editorial contexts)
Parchment#FAF5ECPage bg / light assets
Ink#1C1810Body text (light mode)
Gold Dim#C5A55AAccent / rule lines
Indigo Pale#8060A8Interior left page / emphasis
Parch Rule#D8CEBADividers / borders
| Context |
Background |
Type |
Accent |
| Cover / A+ Hero |
#0D0A07 Ground |
#F0D8A0 Gold |
#D2781E Saffron |
| Interior Spread |
#4A2870 Indigo (left) |
#1C1810 on white (right) |
#D2781E italics |
| Lifestyle / Editorial |
#FAF5EC Parchment |
#1C1810 Ink |
#C5A55A Gold Dim |
| Social / Thumbnail |
#0D0A07 Ground |
#F0D8A0 Gold |
#D2781E + botanical SVG |
Cover Display — Playfair Display 900 / Title Stack
Survival
Takes
a Wild
Use: cover title / A+ hero image headline. The staggered weight shift (900 → 400 italic) on "Takes" is intentional — it performs hesitation, the way survival does.
Author Name — Fraunces Italic 300 (cover) / Fraunces Roman 400 (interior)
Fariha Róisín
Use: cover author credit, back cover, A+ editorial sections. Fraunces carries optical weight without hardness — right for a voice that is tender-but-fierce.
Interior Poetry Body — Fraunces Italic 300 (approx. Garamond Italic)
Did I survive?
Is that why it feels like grief?
— Fariha Róisín
Use: read sample, interior spread assets, A+ editorial copy. The italic body gives the poems a handwritten quality without being decorative.
Metadata / Labels — DM Sans 300 (all-caps, tracked)
Andrews McMeel Publishing · October 2023 · Poetry
Use: back cover publisher block, A+ labels, asset documentation. Never use sans-serif at display size — DM Sans stays in the metadata layer only.
The original cover is not referenced here — this reimagining departs from it entirely in visual language while remaining true to the text. The design goal: a cover that could be read as a physical object, a political document, and a wound simultaneously.
Central Metaphor — Cartographic Fracture
The cover depicts a territory — not a body, not a face, not abstracted paint. A land mass, loosely derived from the shape of Bangladesh, rendered in amber and gold against a deep saffron-to-indigo field. The land form doesn't sit still: it fractures upward into botanical fragments — petals, seed-forms, floating shards — as if the act of writing these poems is physically dissolving the borders that formed her. Latitude lines run across the field, faint and slightly irregular, the grid of a map that no longer fully holds. The self is the territory being mapped. The border is both a political fact and a wound in the body.
Color Rationale — Saffron & Indigo
Saffron and indigo are not chosen for decoration — they live in Bangladeshi visual culture, present in the national flag's green and red, in turmeric and twilight, in the colors of both celebration and mourning. The dark ground is not grief; it is depth of field. The gold type is not ornamentation; it is fire, still burning after everything. The indigo counter-glow suggests the interior of the self, the private space the poems are trying to reach.
Typography Rationale — The Staggered Stack
The title is broken across five lines — "Survival / Takes / a Wild / Imagi- / nation" — with a hyphen mid-word on "Imagi-" that forces the eye to the next line to complete it. This is not a typographic accident. It performs the act the collection describes: survival is not a completed thought. It is a word mid-sentence, still working. The weight shift from 900 to italic 400 on "Takes" introduces hesitation, ambivalence — the exact emotional register of a book about clawing toward freedom you aren't sure you're allowed to have.
All digital assets for this title follow the Andrews McMeel standard naming convention encoding: imprint slug, title slug, asset type, variant, and version. This allows immediate identification across Title Management, Amazon Seller Central, and international e-commerce portals without opening the file.
AMP_TITLE-SLUG_ASSET-TYPE_VARIANT_vN.EXT
AMP_SurvivalWild_CVR_Front_v1.jpg — front cover, print-ready
AMP_SurvivalWild_CVR_Back_v1.jpg — back cover
AMP_SurvivalWild_CVR_Full_v1.pdf — full wraparound cover
AMP_SurvivalWild_ECOMM_BackCover-Reformat_v1.jpg — e-comm back cover
AMP_SurvivalWild_INT_Spread-001_v1.pdf — interior spread pp.1–2
AMP_SurvivalWild_INT_ReadSample_v1.pdf — curated read sample
AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Hero_v1.jpg — Amazon A+ hero (970×300)
AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Lifestyle-01_v1.jpg — lifestyle photography
AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_MapDetail_v1.jpg — cover art detail crop
AMP_SurvivalWild_THUMB_Square_v1.jpg — social thumbnail
AMP_SurvivalWild_META_TitleRecord_v1.xlsx — metadata record
| Filename | Asset Type | Dimensions / Spec | Platform | Status |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_CVR_Front_v1.jpg | Front Cover | 2550×3300 px / 300 dpi | All retail | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_CVR_Back_v1.jpg | Back Cover | 2550×3300 px / 300 dpi | Amazon, B&N | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_ECOMM_BackCover-Reformat_v1.jpg | Back Cover E-Comm | 1500×2000 px / 72 dpi | Amazon display | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_INT_Spread-001_v1.pdf | Interior Spread | 11×8.5 in / 300 dpi | Title Mgmt DB | Spec |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_INT_ReadSample_v1.pdf | Read Sample | 4.9×6.8 in / 300 dpi | Amazon Look Inside | Spec |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Hero_v1.jpg | A+ Hero Banner | 970×300 px / 72 dpi | Amazon A+ | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_MapDetail_v1.jpg | Cover Art Crop | 600×600 px / 72 dpi | Amazon A+ | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Lifestyle-01_v1.jpg | Lifestyle Photo | 600×600 px min / 72 dpi | Amazon A+ | Req. |
| AMP_SurvivalWild_THUMB_Square_v1.jpg | Thumbnail / Social | 1200×1200 px / 72 dpi | Social / promo | Req. |
Front Cover Image
Min. Dimension1000 px longest side
Preferred2550 × 3300 px
Color ModesRGB
FormatJPEG, TIFF, PNG
File Size Max10 MB
Zoom ReadyYes (1000 px min)
970 × 300 px
Dimensions970 × 300 px
Resolution72 dpi
Color ModesRGB
Max File Size2 MB
Text Safe ZoneCentered 770 px
Design NoteSaffron glow centered
Cover Image
Dimensions648 × 1000 px min
Color ModeRGB
FormatJPEG preferred
File Size Max5 MB
Ratio2:3 portrait
Page Size4.9 × 6.8 in
Bleed0.125 in all sides
Resolution300 dpi
Color ModeCMYK (print) / RGB (screen)
FormatPDF/X-1a preferred
The physical back cover carries barcode, price block, publisher mark, and the tagline epigraph. The e-commerce reformat strips the barcode, scales the price block to a clean lock-up, and lets the epigraph — "writing, praying, clawing, scratching her way out" — breathe as a standalone statement image against the dark cover field.
Design Decision
The epigraph is doing more work here than a tagline typically does. It's an action sequence — four verbs in escalating desperation before resolution. In the print version that energy is somewhat buried in standard back-matter layout. The e-commerce reformat foregrounds it: large, italic, gold against dark, positioned in the upper third so it hits before the eye moves to the copy below. The cartographic botanical SVG echoes faintly behind it. This is not decoration — it is the argument of the book, stated before you've read a word.
writing, praying,
clawing, scratching
her way out
Andrews McMeel Publishing
andrewsmcmeel.com
$16.99 U.S.A. · ($22.99 Canada)
ISBN: 978-1-5248-7822-1
— Production file: AMP_SurvivalWild_ECOMM_BackCover-Reformat_v1.jpg · 1500×2000 px · 72 dpi · sRGB
For a 120-page collection, Amazon's standard Look Inside window runs approximately 10–12% of total content — roughly 12 pages. The curation of those pages is the entire first impression. For this title, the goal of the read sample is to establish three things immediately: the visual design of the spread, the emotional register of the voice, and the first of the collection's central questions.
Selection Rationale — Opening Sequence, pp. 1–14
The opening poem's first line — "Did I survive? / Is that why it feels like grief?" — is the collection in two lines. If this lands in the read sample, it closes the browser tab and opens the wallet. The opening spread also establishes the interior design: indigo left page, white right page, saffron italic for emphasis and colophons. A reader who sees this spread knows immediately that this is not a standard commercial poetry title. That differentiation is conversion. The sample should run from front matter through p. 14, including at least the opening poem and the first thematic break.
— Representative interior spread mockup
Did I survive?
Is that why it
feels like grief?
I wanted to be
tenderness itself —
the kind my mother
could not give
because no one
had given it
to her.
— the beginning of knowing
1
| Pages | Content | Include | Rationale |
| i–iv | Front matter — title, copyright, dedication | Yes | Standard; establishes publisher and series context |
| 1–2 | Opening poem — "Did I survive?" | Yes — Priority | Collection's hook; grief/survival ambivalence stated immediately |
| 3–8 | Opening section — questions of family, mother | Yes | Establishes indigo/white spread design; sets thematic terms |
| 9–14 | Continuation — Bangladeshi identity, borders | Yes | Sustains momentum; ~10% of total; ends before resolution |
| 15+ | Remainder — survival, rebuilding, hope | Exclude | Preserve full-book purchase motivation; hope as earned ending |
This title's A+ page should read as an extension of the book's world — not a marketing page, but an atmospheric continuation. The cover's cartographic metaphor is the design language across all modules. Buyers scrolling the A+ section should feel as if they're moving through the book's landscape before they've opened it.
Module 1 — Publisher LogoStandard
Andrews McMeel Publishing mark, centered, white version on transparent background. Placed against the dark saffron field if module allows color; otherwise on white. Anchors the publisher brand before the editorial content begins.
Dimensions600 × 180 px
FormatPNG (transparent bg)
FileAMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_PublisherMark_v1.png
Module 2 — Hero BannerFull Width / Dominant
The cover's dark saffron-indigo field, title lock-up in Playfair Display on the left, a tightly cropped detail of the botanical/cartographic SVG on the right. This is the first thing a reader sees below the fold — it should feel like the cover opening into a wider landscape. No bullet points, no feature callouts. Just the title, the atmosphere, and a single line of author descriptor in DM Sans tracked caps.
"poet · activist · multidisciplinary artist"
Dimensions970 × 300 px
Text Safe ZoneCenter 770 px; left-weighted
Mobile CropCenter-anchored — title within center 600 px
FileAMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Hero_v1.jpg
Module 3 — Image + Text (Right Image)Editorial / About the Voice
Left: editorial copy in Fraunces italic, addressing the reader directly — in Róisín's register: lowercase, searching, certain. Right: the map detail crop from the cover art, tight on the land-mass fracture and botanical forms. This module translates the cover's visual metaphor into language for the reader who hasn't yet understood what they're looking at.
"writing, praying, clawing, scratching her way out of generational trauma — fariha róisín asks the questions that live under the skin. who is my family? what does it mean to be bangladeshi? what is a border?
these poems turn toward hope. not the easy kind."
Image Dimensions300 × 300 px min
Text Limit250 characters
FileAMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_MapDetail_v1.jpg
Module 4 — Four-Image GridLifestyle / Object / Author
Four images: (1) book flat-lay on warm-toned surface — parchment, botanical props, resonant with the saffron-ground palette; (2) close-up of interior spread, indigo left page visible; (3) author photograph — editorial, literary, direct gaze; (4) a detail of the cover art's cartographic field, tightly cropped to show the latitude-line texture. These answer the question "what does owning this book feel like?" — essential for poetry, which is as much object as text.
Each Image300 × 300 px min / 1:1
Caption Limit100 characters each
FilesAMP_SurvivalWild_APLUS_Lifestyle-01–04_v1.jpg
Module 5 — Praise / Text ModuleSocial Proof
A single blurb, large and typographically treated — not a list. Tarfia Faizullah's endorsement is the right choice: it speaks to the collection's core movement (grief to love; survival that gives back) and comes from a voice that signals literary seriousness. Set in Fraunces italic, saffron, on the dark field. One blurb done properly is more persuasive than four done cheaply.
"These are poems written by a poet insistent on building bridges from grief to love — it is through such movement that we may chart a course towards a future in which survival gives more than it costs."
— Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam