Book Covers

The book covers were prominent work from the beginning of creating a design studio, made mostly for the one publishing house growing from producing one title in a couple of months to few new books in a week. Together with my wife, we have designed more than 300 covers just for the biggest customer and the next couple of hundred for other publishers.

The design process starts by meeting with the editor or the author, receipt or research of sources, then presenting optional sketches, works in progress developing few ideas. Basically, it is cooperative work, or you become the production artist, and the publisher commissions the cover by pointing to a template from your portfolio.

Thanks to cooperation based on successful publishing, on the strengthened trust of the client, the development of new concepts and effects is allowed, even within a compact budget. It all works for the publishing house. Consequently, this was my frequent experience, taking the publisher to a high level, and being asked to decide whether I am part of the publishing house, or remaining an outsider.

As I was usually engaged in the whole publishing process, it was quite rare in my case to work solely on the cover design, and usually the layout was composed using visuals selected from materials provided as the illustrations of the book. Unfortunately, this approach blurs the individual features of the design and makes it more layout composition than artwork.

Covers as a part of bigger projects

In publishing projects, there are often supplementary conditions, such as creating a publishing series or expanding the project with multimedia additions or unique materials and illustrations that require the use of special techniques.

Sometimes a book is issued as a softcover and a hardcover. Hardcover requires a covering sheet and may also be delivered with a dust jacket.

Other elements designed for the cover function are the artwork layouts for accompanying electronic media, such as CD or DVD sleeves or cases, or splash screens opening digital presentations.

The cover design of the publishing series takes into account the need for modification for new titles while maintaining the composition for series identification.

The following books are richly illustrated, referencing visual content available on other media, online or attached presentations, foreshadowing the content on the cover. The book displayed in the middle contained black and white photos of geological samples. To increase the depth of the grayscale, the illustrations were printed with two inks: black and gray, which increased the tonal range of the grayscale theoretically to the power of two, from 256 to 65,000 shades. The preparation for print was done as a duotone.

The following covers are designed as a series for the subsequently published books on selected issues related to the wildlife of the country.