T H E S T O R Y
Four Years In An Alternate Universe is my work-in-progress collection of poetry about my time at university. As with many of my writing projects, I decided it needed a book cover before it was even close to being done, just so I would have something to look at while working on putting it together. I wanted to create something slightly surreal, as the concept of alternate universes is a very surreal concept to think about. A lot of inspiration was taken from surrealist photo collages that I'd seen around creative online communities recently. The idea for a miniature solar system hanging from a hand was actually adapted from a minimalist tattoo I saw on Instagram that I thought was really cool. Overall, this book cover design is a conglomerate of many inspiration sources and original ideas.
This is the first incarnation of my poetry collection's cover design; I expect that during the rest of my college experience, I will have many other ideas that might take this one's place. For now, however, this is the cover of Four Years In An Alternate Universe.
“Four Years In An Alternate Universe”
June 2016
Digital Design / Illustration
P R O C E S S
First, I scoured my personal photographs for a photo of my hand and ended up with this one from late 2014. I also searched for a good night-sky photo, of which I had none of my own (thanks to Pixabay's free stock website, I did end up being able to get a high-res photo of the Milky Way for the background). I then cut the hand out of the rest of its background and edited the colors so they would match the tones of the background image.
Drawing the planets was hard—at the time, I hadn't yet gotten a graphics tablet, so all the shapes you see drawn on this book cover were actually drawn by-hand with my laptop's trackpad and the pen tool in Photoshop. It was a rough time, but I ended up liking how imperfect they were, so I don't anticipate redrawing them with a graphics tablet anytime soon.
The front cover version of this book cover design.
