Book Cover Redesign
PROJECT
Book Cover Design
WORK
Graphic Design
Photo Manipulation
I recently watched this great video on book cover design, featuring Elisha Zepeda from Faceout Studios. Feeling inspired, I thought I’d use the title in the video, Amelia: From Aviation Pioneer To The Vanished Unknown, to create a few covers of my own for this fake biography on Amelia Earhart. On blue and green are mine, while on beige is Zepeda’s (which he notes in the video is unfinished). Click the arrows to see spines.
To start, I thought about a view from Amelia’s perspective. Earhart spent a lot of time alone in clouds, an image that can signify adventure, but also the loneliness of being a vanguard. In my covers, I used white clouds in a halftone pattern to give a sense of both great-wide-open solo adventure, but also vanishing into thin air.
Riffing on the title, I thought: why not vanish Amelia? So, I knocked her out of the clouds, underlining the enduring power of her mysterious disappearance. I chose a dynamic image with hand on hip so the shape wasn’t just a formless block. I also used the typography to hint at the vanishing, using a thinner font on the second half of the subtitle.
And just in case using only her name isn’t enough for readers, of course, we needed a plane.
Lastly, I’m not so keen on the pink, since it can be seen as gendered (“first woman who…” “only woman who…” etc), so I tried a sky blue instead, but didn’t love the nail-on-head look of white clouds against blue. I went back to the pink because ultimately, the strangeness of a pink sky was more arresting.
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For more of my exprience in graphic print design, see my portfolio here.
Artwork ©Regan McDonell and ©Elisha Zepeda