Book Cover Photo Manipulation

As part of my design project for the The Big Sleep book cover competition I created an image that show cases the design on a real book. I used Adobe Photoshop to over lay the design onto a photograph of a book with the same dimensions. 

I believe that this image allows you to see what the design would look like in the real world and works well to communicate the design message.

The Big Sleep Book Cover - Final Design

I have created the final design of the The Big Sleep cover for the Penguin Design Award and I have just submitted it to Penguin. I am happy with the overall design, even though I had difficulty creating it on Adobe Illustrator.

I now have to just wait for the competition to close on the 9th April and for the entries to be judged. Fingers crossed I get through to the next round!

You can view the full Final Design here.

The Big Sleep Cover - Silhouettes

I have created 4 possible silhouettes to be used on The Big Sleep book cover that I'm designing, I have photographed myself in appropriate clothing to avoid any copyright infringement.

Each silhouette is in a slightly different pose, I now have to decide which will look best on the cover...

Silhouette 1

Silhouette 2

Silhouette 3

Silhouette 4

The Big Sleep cover design competition

I am aiming to enter the Penguin Design Award competition. This year, entrants are tasked with designing with the symbolic crime/detective novel by Raymond Chandler.

After reading the book, there is a few scenes and characters that could be used in a design concept.


Below are a few examples of previous cover designs, all have a common theme of guns and girls, it's my feeling that these themes have been used to death for this type of novel, so I'm looking to create something slightly different...

I have created a preliminary mock up of an idea I've had, as seen below:

I have used a very simple graphic image, with the main character  casting a shadow of a knight chess piece in a doorway. The Knight idea came from the running theme in the book of Marlowe (the lead character) being a knight in a dirty, corrupted world.

The deadline for competition submissions is the 9th of April, I have some more development work to do to be ready for that approaching deadline.