This assignment was one of my absolute favorites! I was tasked with creating a special edition design of any media of my choice. After a struggle with indecision, I ultimately chose to do a tenth anniversary edition design for The Selection by Kiera Cass. I love reading, and I love that book series. I wanted to do it justice with whatever I came up with, so I did some research. I dove into the book itself and reread it, writing down ideas as I went.
The original cover was a photograph type design, so I wanted it to be a little more illustrative. I sketched out a few ideas before I got into any software because it can be daunting for me to just jump right onto my computer.
I wanted to make sure the book cover was functional first before I got into any of the decorative stuff, so I used Illustrator to lay out each panel. As any reader will tell you, it’s annoying when book reviews are on the back cover, so I decided to put the synopsis on the back instead like many books of the past did. I used the same font the original cover used called Yana designed by Laura Worthington and a similar color palette.
Once I got the bones figured out, I could finally get to the fun stuff: the decoration. I wanted to have an intricate floral design, but I also wanted to incorporate something hand painted because I enjoy that. I decided that I would take the list of ideas I had made and paint little simplified icons as the main elements of the cover.
After I painted everything, I scanned the icons and placed them onto the book cover where I wanted them. I then decided to use Procreate to finish the pattern. I determined what specific elements I wanted to use and took off. It took a couple hours to do, but I eventually finished and put everything together so I could print it.
