Saving Grace by @a-spectacular-pigeon
August 3, 2025
Full cloth case binding with paper inlay and design in heat transfer vinyl.
This fic is, in my opinion, the absolute top tier of PHM fanfiction. Reading it brought me all the same feelings as reading the novel, but moreso. The way Rocky is characterized in this fic is just so, so good, it's permanently impacted how I see the character. I stayed up till 2am to finish it and then immediately asked permission to bind it because I immediately knew I had to.
In my design I really wanted to emphasize that this book is from Rocky's perspective, even though it's written in english using earth units (as is explained, in universe, by the fact that Rocky is writing for a human audience). Converting the chapter numbers to seximal and using eridian numerals was an easy decision, but for the rest of the book I was faced with a challenge: physical books are an inherently visual medium, and (most of) my options for decoration are visual in nature. How do I handle that when the POV character is blind and experiences the world through senses completely foreign to humans? I thought about using sonar-style designs of audio waveforms, but figured that was too on the nose (and, in a way, too human). I eventually settled on using images of the disturbances soundwaves create through various media (liquids for the title page and table of contents, sand for the cover and chapter headings) to represent how eridians interpret the world via omnidirectional sound in a way that human readers can understand. My favorite cyamatics images were all black and white, which sent me down the road towards a strictly greyscale aesthetic. Most of the images and motifs in the design are straight horizontal and vertical lines, as a nod to the theme of "alignment" in the fic.
Materials: covers - 2 mm grey board spine stiffener - paperboard covering material - black linen bookcloth inlay - image printed on cardstock vinyl - siser easyweed white vinyl
endpapers - grey cardstock with pearl finish endbands - faux double core french endband, with cotton embroidery floss textblock paper - Church bookbinding paper, 20lb, cream, 8.5x11
Typeset: Designed in Scribus. The body text is Libertinius Serif Regular, with page numbers and running headers in SAASeriesADOT Regular, titles in Beiamox Regular, and ornaments in Bergamot Ornaments Regular. Images by Paul Hindemith, Jordi Torrents, and the NASA Johnson Space Center.
Cover Design: Designed in Photopea. Fonts used are Beiamox Regular (front, spine) and SAASeriesADOT (back). Cyamatics image by cadboy_hk.
dimensions: 5.25"x8.25"
Some earlier design tests: