Please view my Portfolio here.
Redesigns
Below are what I call my Redesigns. Each month I take a look at the New York Times Best Seller’s List, pick one from the list, and “redesign” the cover.
(Original covers always on the left, my “redesigns” always on the right)
September 2021
The Noise by James Patterson and J.D. Barker
The Amazon description for this book says “In the shadow of Mount Hood, sixteen-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister Sophie when the girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams…” Going off that, I decided to find a picture of Mount Hood. I drew it in Illustrator and added the tree-line in such a way as to resemble a sine wave…a visual representation of noise, if you will.
July/August 2021 (alas, work and vacation got me behind, so I combined these months)
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
I liked the original design, which picks up on the idea of one marble being different, separated…an outlier if you will. But then I thought, rather than use a marble, why not just use the typography? And so I made the tittle of the letter ” i ” (that’s what the dot is called—a tittle) the outlier. Then I reversed the colors to make it stand out more. I added the ornament in the middle, which kind of begins and ends with a “tittle,” to indicate that outliers can be positive or negative.
June 2021
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van Der Kolk
When I first looked at this cover, I saw red, white, and blue…and the yellow star/asterisks and thought they looked like fireworks. The color scheme just didn’t work for me. I found this image of a distressed/depressed-looking girl and added the cut/scar marks in Photoshop to give the appearance of a girl keeping “score” of her trauma by cutting herself. Then I gave the cover a sickly green tint so there’d be no mistaking the nature of the book.
May 2021
A Gambling Man by David Baldacci
For my first Redesign, I chose this cover because I wanted to know what this red car has to do with “the gambling man.” I read the description of the book on Amazon.com which mentions it’s a “1939 Delahaye convertible” that he apparently acquires in Reno. Does he acquire it gambling? Don’t know, but this is a story about a man, not a car. The description says he also picks up an “aspiring actress” and goes on to describe how the man, Archer, hopes to apprentice with a P.I. and former FBI agent. The two “infiltrate the world of brothels, gambling dens, drug operations, and long-hidden secrets…” Again, doesn’t seem to me this is a story about a car, but about a man. I chose to focus on that for my cover and drew inspiration from playing cards—both the Ace and King.
