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Saturday, July 9, 2011

Designing a Book Cover

Since I have a decent background in digital arts and my amazing friend Lydia is an awesome photographer, I decided to make my own book cover for my upcoming book "The Chronicles of Vallanie Sharp" (an excerpt of which is conveniently located under "excepts"). It's still in progress, but as I've come up with something satisfying, I thought I'd look back over the steps it took to get there. 


Here was a design I came up with a few months ago:
The eyes were annoying me. I kept changing their size, so you could see more or less of the face. I'm not happy with the way they are here. I was going to add something (likely a DNA strand) in the dark space at the bottom. I do like the way the text looks, and the black background. 

Here is a working sketch Lydia drew up:
I love the background picture. I love the purple. I actually really love this, except it doesn't fit the content of my book well enough. (Make's me think of a ghost/horror story. I'm going for more sci-fi/adventure, with perhaps a subtle creepy undertone). 

With something "dome like" in mind (since the story takes place in one), Lydia created with the following design:
While I loved the image, it again didn't fit the mood I was going for. 

So I tweaked it a bit and came up with the following:

Still, something was missing (the edge of the picture needed to be touched up, at the very least). 

And fixing that brought me to where I am now (ignore the difference in title... that's a whole different challenge I'm working on):



What do you think? Critiques are welcome, especially if they are accompanied with suggestions for improvement :)


7 comments:

  1. My favorites are the first and the last covers, I actually really like the eyes! Although, it seems like both are missing something. I hope more people comment because we need some fresh thoughts!

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  2. Yeah, I like the eyes, but they're missing the eyebrows... but then when I include the eyebrows entirely, they become too small... I'll let you look at it sometime and you can mess around with it if you want :)

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  3. I actually liked the second-to-the-last cover, except for the title which is too dark imho. Maybe if you play around with the font and the color it might spark something??

    Goodluck!

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  4. The purple is great and stands out- I really like that cover- too bad it didn't fit your content well. I like the ending cover so far, looks professional.

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  5. Thanks :) I'll play around with the last two a little more and see if I can improve them.

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  6. I love the cover! It's great, I'd definitely pick it up if I saw it in a store. It might be cool if the picture inside the dome was a little clearer/larger, but other than that I just love it!

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  7. I love the last two the best--they're catchy and clean. And they'll show up great as thumbnails.

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