Book Cover Illustration and Design
Beads of Bones Book One
Client approached me to do a book cover for a book she was writing. This was a Mid to Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy book. After our first meeting I went to work reading the book and researched the visual genre of Science Fiction and fantasy. Most of the books looked fairly similar and we felt her book needed an approach that would make it stand out but still belong to this category.
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Information about branding
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It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.
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Illustration of front cover in PDF and jpeg version, an InDesign folder of the full book jacket for the printer and optimized large, medium and small images for the web.
The Process
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Branding and Moodboard
The author needed a little couching on what her book looks like, so Cathy and I went through a series of images, fonts and branding cards to arrive at a brand and visual concept that spoke to her. Here is the moodboard for this book and the future books in the series.
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Visual Concept
Based on the mood-board and the story line, I provided a starting point to decide on what images she thought looked like the building and character in her book. The library was too fairy tale castle like, she wanted something more austere.
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Rough Draft
Finally the visual idea was coming together. I gave the library a second try, but it still was not quite right. Then added the evergreens for the forest and the character based on Cathy’s visuals of a 1910 women’s dress.
Final Draft
It took some time to come up with the library in the background, but now it is there. Cathy was able to come up with the title of her book and we played around with some fonts until it felt right. I made one last modifications to the character and her magic and called this part complete.
Cathy decided to go with a full book jacket for her cover, so I provided her with a word count per section and then waved my magic typography tool to it and called it done.
The deliverable was a full print out version along with web based images she could use for her website.
Stay tuned the cover for Book 2 is on its way. This will not take as long now that the branding is done.
The Book Cover Jackets
