Objective: 

Design a book cover using a common household object and a real book or play title.

The first step in the process was finding the required minimum of three household objects, which we needed to photograph. I thought it would be easy to find three objects to shoot. It wasn't. After about a half-hour of searching, I finally settled on three objects: a rubber duck, a nail, and a handful of pencils. I did my first round of photography at night, with the hopes that I would get a nice, dramatic image...

I knew I wanted something dramatic and engaging for my book cover, but I just didn't find what I was looking for in these shots. While some were very unique and interesting (how about that nail with the glowing tip?!), they also often had artifacts or blurriness due to shooting in low light without a tripod. (Mine got broken a few days before this shoot.)

About a week later, with a renewed spirit and after getting feedback from my peers, I decided that a total 180˚ turn was in order: instead of dark and plain, I thought I'd try light and colorful. Here are the results of the second shoot:

I liked all of these photos much better, and decided to get my book titles & authors figured out. With all of these photos in mind, I made a handful of book covers to test my design ideas out:

I had dozens and dozens of suggestions from friends and family of what books or plays could be represented by these photos — from The Ugly Ducking to The Holy Bible and everything in between — but settled on a book called The Promise of a Pencil, which I'm told is not only a fantastic book, but also its proceeds go to helping an organization called Pencils of Promise which builds schools in Guatemala, Ghana, and Laos.

The pencil photo I chose for my final book cover (cover #10 above) was what I decided made the most sense, so that was my final submission: