Millwall...

A book all about the musings of a Millwall FC supporter. This book is going to be on sale in the official club shop and other bookshops - I felt it needed to look like a proper sports book - not just in imagery, but also in chunky, sans serif typography and a clean, crisp layout. I also used the club colours of blue and white as a base to work from, so it looks specifically associated to Millwall FC.

Artemis and Crackers

A photographic tribute to a famous cruiseliner:

And an alternative, slightly darker take on Christmas from a personal diary:

A couple of new-ish ones

A guide-book style one, and a spooky book about witches...

'Colourising' an old photograph...

For this cover I decided to use some fancy(ish) software to put colour into a wartime mono image. Colour images can bring a cover like this to life, and with the book being 'An Illustrated History' I felt it needed an injection of colour and vibrancy! The typography was inspired by a poster I saw a while back for a wartime film (forgotten the name) - I think the chunky text and granite-like texture gives the cover that gritty atmosphere. Hope you boys and girls like it!

The Tudors (again!)

This is one book split into two volumes, so the covers needed a continuous theme. The simple use of cutouts of famous figures from the Tudor family define the eras of the two different books!

Voyage to Oblivion

Bleak title for a bleak subject. 
The challenge of this cover was to make something, dark and slightly menacing with a couple of ropey black and white photographs. I used overlays and textures to bring the images and text to life. The blue reflects the sinking of the boat by a submarine, around the time of Pearl Harbor...

Another one just published!

Emphasis on the typography here - nice red/white/blue classic British colour scheme to reflect the patriotic tone of the book. Pretty decent colour photograph too!

Exploring Nottinghamshire - if that's your thing.

Another paperback cover (from this afternoon). I decided it would be cool to break up many views from the book with a compass... giving it that 'exploration' feel. I used a paper texture blend to create a 'warm' effect and give the cover extra atmosphere. Anyway, I hope you like it!

One from today

Local history, guidebook-style - quirky facts about Torquay! Click the pics to see the cover in a bit more detail.

Supernatural.

In case you were wondering, the round thing in the sky (superimposed of course) is a stone from the 13th century (ish) that was reckoned to have healing powers. I saturated the colour in the landscape photograph to add to the 'supernatural', slightly mystical theme of the book! I also added a ghostly blendy glowy effect to the photograph, which you may notice too...

Lusitania

My major project at the moment is this one. It's a beast - it's going to be around 400 pages in length, A4 size and filled with over 600 photographs. It's all about a cruise liner that sunk (torpedoed) in the First World War, but was one of the leading passenger ships of its time. There are some fantastic images throughout the book, and I've been given a free reign on the design, albeit with strict picture placement guidelines! 


I'm really enjoying this project; the quality of the photographs mean I can get really creative with the layout and each spread is different. Here are some of the spreads from the book so far (I'm 210 pages into it) - it's a mono book, so no colour unfortunately. Have a look and click on the pics to see the spreads close-up!

Lots of pretty paintings...

This is an ongoing project of mine at Amberley. The author has painted all the wildlife around her over the course of a year and I've been asked to design and produce a book out of her work. As you can see there is a huge amount of sketches and quite a lot of descriptive text, so producing each page is like a small project in itself!


Here's what I've come up with so far (I'm about halfway through this one!)...
Again, please click to see the spreads in more detail :)

Jackets

Two recently designed jackets for hardbacks, click on the images to see the designs in more detail!

Margaret Beaufort

A bit of Tudor history jacket design.

Some new jackets

World War Two... recently printed!
The Frontstalag 142 jacket design involved developing the front cover of the original wartime diary that the book is based on.

SIR PATRICK MOORE'S NEW BOOK...

Aimed at primary school children, this book by the famous astronomer is a full colour title where I was given totally free rein on the design! I aimed to make the book colourful, clear and visually exciting so as to appeal to the 7-8year olds kids that it is aimed at...

The Lake Poets

Some more hardbacks

Jacket

In my opinion, there's something about designing a book jacket for a hardback that is ultimately more satisfying than a paperback cover. I think it's the way you can open up the book and the design develops as the jacket wraps around the coverboard - the design doesn't stop at what you can see on the bookshelf.

Here's a recent one of mine. It's all about the deaths of kings and queens. Notice the cover illustration - interesting.

Paperback designs

Here's some recent books of mine that are now printed and bound...