SCA266: Short Stories Book Cover: Rough Concepts

So our final assignment for our Photography class is to build a cover for a short story. We had a set list of stories to choose from, I chose "Greasy Lake". The story is about 3 friends who travel to Greasy Lake as their hangout looking for trouble (drugs, sex, alcohol etc). However, they run into real trouble after one of their friends gets in a brawl with a biker.

With both designs, I went with a vignette effect. I find that it helps focus the viewer towards the focal point of the design. The first cover I went with a black and white and an accent colour. The red type and the blood on the hand against a black and white background will really jump out at the reader and grab their attention. The bloody hand relates to the brawl one of the characters gets in. The hand is not mine, it's there just strictly as a mock up for the real composition.

Cover Design 1

Cover Design 2

When I got the bulk of this design done, I got the "movie poster" vibe with this one, so I went with it. Added a blue hue to the picture and the vignette to make the image look more eerie and ominous. The shooting location was a pond area in my neighbourhood right next to a shopping centre. It had heavy tree cover and murky, dirty water, so I knew right away that this location would be the best place to shoot my pictures.

GRA230: Typography Book cover

For this assignment, we were to design a book cover for a novel from a selected list. I chose the book 'Slaughterhouse 5'. It's a story about a U.S. soldier who gets captured by German soldiers and imprisoned in a disused slaughter titled "Slaughterhouse 5". Synopsis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five

We had to design 5 covers as rough concepts and then choose the best design and refine it as our final cover.

Initial designs:

Final Concept:

I like the Stencil typeface because it reminds me of the way military units would mark crates for rations, medicine and weapons, given the fact that this book is set during WW2, I figured that typeface would be appropriate. The deep red is a very eye-catching colour, it shows the aggressive, gory nature of the book. The red to black gradient symbolizes the "out of body" experiences the main character has during the story; believing he travels backwards and forwards in time, jumping to all these different scenes including being abducted by aliens to a docile, post-war lifestyle.

Alter Bridge "Blackbird" logo: Final Product

So this is the final product. The top image is the actual album cover and the bottom image is my finished version. Built using Illustrator for the trace of the bird, the type and the masking of the texture on the letters and Photoshop to render the background. There are still a few finicky details left to render like the texture on the bird.

Total build time: 5 hours 45 mins

Alter Bridge "Blackbird" logo cont.

So I've made some progress on the Alter Bridge "Blackbird" logo. This time around I've traced out the type on the album cover. Tracing out the "A" and the "E" turned out to be quite interesting seeing as how those two letters had a really rough line quality to them, so I tried to get in as much detail as I could with those two letters. Next step is to build and match the album background.

Total time: 4hrs 15 mins.

Alter Bridge "Blackbird" logo

So this is a logo trace, done in Illustrator of the "blackbird" logo by the Hard Rock band Alter Bridge. Just more freelance/practice stuff. The type and background will come later...

Total build time: 2 hrs 15 mins