The Power of Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the most powerful resources in mankind’s toolkit.
Telling stories can entertain, bringing unlike people together to share an experience. This phenomenon goes as far back as Old English in the time of the Anglo-Saxons, as communities would come together to hear oral renditions of stories like Beowulf. Storytelling traces back to before written language was widespread, and possibly even before its presence in the English language at all. Stories can spread moral lessons, they can educate, they can amuse, and they can inspire.
At its core, BAP Agency aims to tell stories for our clients. We want to help the people that come to us by providing them with the support, inspiration, and resources they need to spread their unique messages to the world. We always aim to help our clients Make Their Mark on this world. This is exactly the relationship we built in 2022 when a retired police officer came to us, asking for help designing the cover of his memoir-type book. Although only a small part in the book project as a whole, BAP Agency was fortunate enough to work alongside Albertville local Ken Mote, as he set out to deliver his testimony of faith, having been personally inspired by the many miracles he had faced during his long and unpredictable journey as a policeman.
Mote worked independently to write his story, and came to us at the end stages of the project, after finding his own professional printer for the actual production. The last step for Ken was to ensure that his book has a high-quality, professional book cover to reflect him as a person and embody the story he hopes to tell. In this collaborative process, the first step to helping Ken was simply understanding what he wanted to express to the people flipping through his carefully crafted pages and to understand the message as a whole that he wanted to get out into the world. We, as a brand-centered creative team, needed to get to know Ken, understand his mission, learn about how exactly he wanted the world to perceive his message, and what he wanted the collective to take away from his book after reading it.
Laying the Foundation
Ken Mote’s journey leading up to him writing his own rendition of faith-based miracles perhaps begins when he was 21 years old and was drafted into the military. Ken served in the Vietnam War, and became a military policeman, officially beginning his career in law enforcement. After the war, he went to Florida where he attended a Bible college and began working at his first non-military police job at the Indian River County Sheriff Department. Eventually, Mote moved his family back to Alabama, and he served 4 years as a Boaz City officer, before finally settling into a 31-year career with the Albertville Police Department.
In his retirement, getting his message of belief out into the public was a top priority. Ken found it pertinent that people understand the glory God had given him and he feels passionate about guiding others into the grace that he believes in. Thinking of movies/memoirs that touch on the premise of faith-based miracles and the success those testimonies have garnered, it was obvious to our team that Ken’s project could be extremely enticing and marketable, if done well. People of any faith could enjoy Ken’s message. Ensuring that Ken’s pages and words had an excellent cover to nestle between would be a big help in improving the desirability of his book, particularly if he hopes for people of all faiths to pick it up and give it a chance. The phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” is good in theory, but really, everyone judges the cover of a book. It’s the first factor in deciding if a book will be worth reading – considering Ken is local to a rural town and is self-published, having a professionally designed cover created with intention will really work to Ken’s advantage long-term, as he disperses copies of Miracle In Blue throughout the community.
Our creative team of branding and advertising professionals sat with Mote and first discussed what he wants people to walk away from his book understanding. The number one thing to consider when working with any client is what they want the impact of their brand/project/etc to be. With Ken, we had to understand that he had just come out of a 35 year career where he had become accustomed to risking his life indefinitely. He had worked very hands-on, and often paid the price for it. During his career, Ken feels that he has been brought back from every hardship by having faith in something bigger than himself, so he wants to use his personal testimony to show people how they can do the same. The biography that ended up being printed on the back of the book explains that Ken died on the scene while working as a policeman, and on another instance he was rushed to a hospital, where he died on the operating table briefly. Ken believes that he should never have made it to retirement, but he is still here, something he attributes solely to God.
Planning out the Cover
The next big step in undertaking this project was to discuss Ken’s actual expectations of the book cover’s aesthetic. He had initially told us that he wanted the book cover to have a sky-blue theme with white lettering. He wanted the cover to feature an old photo of him with his police car, and he wanted the back to have a picture of him and his spouse. We listened to his ideas and made work what we could. Unfortunately, the image Ken wanted us to incorporate was a less-than-ideal image of an original photograph (a picture of a picture), and it would not translate well to graphic design and print. With his best interest in mind, and because we want his book to be as visually appealing as possible, we redirected him.
After hearing his ideas, we were forthcoming and let him know that the specific photograph he’d brought in to show his vision would likely not be the best route and he was understanding and very agreeable to our professional opinions. As a creative team focused on fine-tuning, we expressed to him that we didn’t want to compromise the integrity of his ideas, but that prioritizing quality was significant to us as well. He knew that we were working in his best interest. We settled on a good alternative, keeping the police car idea but setting out to find a stock image that we could use to fulfill Ken’s vision instead, in order to maintain a professional level of quality when printed onto a physical book.
The stock image we ended up sourcing was fairly generic in the foreground, just showing the top of a police cruiser with the sirens lit up. The background of the image is what made it the perfect fit for this BAP project. In front of the police car, off in the distance, you can see a horizon of hazy lights. Most of the lights in the image are red and blue like that of a police car, indicative of other police cars present, but it could also be a far away cityscape. The exact source of the lights is unknown (remember, it is a stock image), but what stood out to the creative team at BAP is the mood it created when looking at it. The haziness in the foreground created an aura of uncertainty, a sense of the unknown, and we felt that strongly paralleled Ken’s message.
Ken has strong religious faith and believes that God is who kept him alive through all of his job-related perils. To have faith is to have certainty in something even if it is ambiguous. Ken has faith in his savior (literally, according to Ken’s recounts of near-death experiences) despite not being able to see or touch him. Besides paralleling his faith, the lights also perfectly symbolize the brink of life and death that Ken so frequently traveled, the limbo his line of work often put him in. It may seem like a reach, but we really felt like the hazy, blurred lights were perfect for this book. After finding the perfect image to use, we did minimal editing – basic cropping, nothing serious.
After finding the image that worked as the foundation of the cover, another slight adjustment we did to stay on theme with Ken’s vision, while also improving the quality and overall appearance of the book was just slightly altering the colors he initially envisioned. Instead of the sky blue he initially wanted, we ended up using a more dark, royal blue. The new shade better represented the police-centered content, and accentuated the blues in the chosen stock image. The white lettering Ken initially requested was more doable and cohesive, so we were able to deliver that easily.
We were able to make the back of the book exactly as Ken had originally requested. He provided us with a photo of him and his wife that was of good quality, and he wrote his own biography to be put with the photo. Beneath that we placed a scripture that resonated with Ken and the experiences that led him to write the book in the first place. It had almost entirely come together at that point.
The Technical Side of Creating a Book Cover
The final step in making sure the book cover design was perfect for Ken was checking that the measurements were appropriate to the pages his publisher was putting out. When you design a book cover, you create it as one continuous piece of art. It may sound strange, but if you think about it, a book cover is one entity that just wraps all the way around the front, the spine, and the back. When we laid it out, the back was a left-panel, the spine with the title and author name was in the middle, and the front cover was the right-panel. Ken supplied us with all the information we needed, including the width of the spine, so we could ensure each panel of the artwork was appropriate and would make for a perfect fit.
After brainstorming with Ken and understanding his story as a whole, making the changes we needed to, and laying out the artwork with Adobe Illustrator exactly how it needed to be, we got a final product proof sent to the client. Mote was highly satisfied with the end result, and was able to take the art file to his printer and have his physical copies finally created.
At BAP Agency, we are huge about helping our clients Make their Mark on the world, whether the client is a large business or just a single person like Ken. Books are probably the most obvious form of storytelling, and while we enjoy the process of telling brand stories through creative advertising, and digital marketing, helping with this project was a great way to keep in touch with the foundation of storytelling in this classic way. It was a pleasure working with Ken, hearing his life story firsthand, and creating a book cover to help him tell the many miracles that God has performed throughout his life so far.
