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.

Prompt: DREAM VS REALITY

Ted Dekker’s Black focuses on the protagonist jumping between the real world and a fantasy world every time he falls asleep, and I wanted to depict that dreamscape in the cover design. Since Black is the first book in the Circle Series, I also wanted the iconic shape to be obvious.

I first created a single horizon line with a skyline of Denver and a tree line. I warped the combined image into a sphere and colored the two worlds to represent the locations in the novel. Since the book is a dark fantasy retelling of the Garden of Eden, I wanted to show black trees creeping in through the edges (which is also a feature seen in the novel itself).

I have a time-lapse design of my process on YouTube you can check out here.

Prompt: DIFFERENT

In a world where sameness is a requirement and every citizen is colorblind, Jonas begins to see the color red. It makes him different from his peers and enables him to learn about his community’s past in order to heal their future. As a modern classic dystopian, I wanted the cover to mimic other books in its genre. To do that, I created simple, vector-esque artwork that relied on symbolism instead of creating a scene. The red apple (a symbol already seen in the novel) represents the protagonist amongst all his peers.

I wanted the cover to be predominantly monochromatic, with the red slowly seeping in on the title treatment. I also wanted the title to appear with a small optical blur, since much of the book deals with sight. The size of the V is a nod to the movie’s logo.

Prompt: START-FINISH

This was an Australian series I grew up with in high school. The main character had exactly one year to survive the villains and solve a family mystery—all while running from the police for a crime he didn’t commit. Each book was named after each month in the year, with the character on the cover usually doing parkour and running from his enemies. I wanted to mimic that look in mine, choosing to use much of the colors and visual themes to create a new design.