At my alma mater, seniors studying Professional Writing must compile their best writing samples—including fiction, poetry, advertisements, and essays—and publish them in a physical portfolio at the end of the semester. Most PW majors enlist friends or hire out the design work so they can better focus on editing their pieces, and I’ve enjoyed doing a number of portfolios for the last few years. This was Emily Thompson’s final portfolio design. She wanted an artistic flair to the cover similar to my PCC Survival Guide book. Many of her portfolio pieces demonstrated themes of hope and revival from difficult or trying times in life, and she wanted to correlate that theme with the fireweed blossoms that grow up after devastating forest fires. For this reason, I decided to play with color clashing with monochromatic greys. I deliberately chose to make the edges of the book charred and ashy looking, but as the blossoms come into the foreground, I wanted them to become bright and colorful.
Cover Design for “Power Author 2”
This is my first sequel design, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Power Author 1 was my first “big break” in cover design, and since then I’ve enjoyed partnering with Ben Wolf on other books. I guess he liked the first one enough to book me for the series. *cheers*
Cover Design for “The Last Line of Their Lives”
I’m happy to reveal my newest cover design for debut author Andrew D. Doan. This was a ton of fun to put together. When Andrew told me it was about an esteemed cemetery that the wealthy people of the town were *literally* dying to claim for their final resting place, I knew I was going to have a blast. Typically cemeteries are creepy and belong in horror novels—but this one? Let’s have the tombstones made of gold!!
Cover Design for “The Kingdom Heir”
I was able to design this cover for Lana Howell’s debut novel, The Kingdom Heir, published by Xulon Press.
Cover Design for “Live the Impossible”
I had the privilege to design the cover for Jenny Smith’s new memoir, Live the Impossible, a book about her time in a wheelchair and how it’s made her into who she is today.
Cover and Layout Design for “A Writer’s Wilderness”
Ever want to read a western…but with dragons? Kylee Kosoff just graduated with her degree in professional writing and published an anthology of her work (and yes, there be dragons in the west).
Cover Design for Ben Wolf’s “Power Author”
I designed this cover for Ben Wolf, author of Ghost Mine and the Blood Mercenaries series. This was my first time designing a nonfiction work, so my style had to adapt to accommodate for it. Instead of creating a scene or relying on a cinematic design, I wanted “writing book” to be the first message a potential buyer would get. That called for a light cover and the word “author” as big as I could get it. Ben also asked if I would include a book that had both science fiction and fantasy elements emerging from its pages. I took color inspiration from Save the Cat!, one of the most notable writing books for fiction writers on the market. It features a bold orange that goes against cliché color pallets for writing books (like red and black). Instead of orange, I picked an equally-striking yellow, which led to the play off of “power” as gears, machines, and electricity. You can purchase Power Author on Amazon.
End-Semester Book Cover Redesigns
This is the second half of my semester redesigns. For our Conceptual Communications class we had to create weekly artwork based on a prompt. I decided to redesign well-known book covers based on each. Below are each of the three covers with their original photo references that I used to combine into a single image. One of my goals for these projects is to create a professional book cover using entirely free resources from Pixabay, Dafont, and other online sites (with the obvious exception of Adobe, which sadly isn’t free). Below you can see each photo I used in each cover, and you can find every resource free online.
Mockup Cover Designs for RED Trilogy
Eighteen-year-old River Ardis lives in a future where terrorists infiltrate the country as teenagers. She tries her best to keep her head down and away from the unrest until she meets a distraught girl from the 1990s. But little do either of them know, the oppressive government has been hunting the time traveler for years—and anyone associated with her. I began writing my time travel dystopian trilogy when I was fourteen, and it’s since undergone extensive edits for the past ten years. While I intend to pursue a traditional publishing house, which would be responsible for cover designs, I wanted to design my own cover and layout for a class project.
The Genres of Red Riding Hood
For my graduate Conceptual Communication class, I had to do a project that would depict the idea of “compare and contrast.” I decided to do a genre study and create a set of book covers that showed the classic story of Red Riding Hood in six of the biggest genres on the market.