Chet Baker Book Cover

Here are a couple of the book cover design ideas I came up with. They're for a book about trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, the late jazz musician who made beautiful music but lived a tortured life.

The book title, Born To Be Blue, plays off of the music as well as the tragic nature of his life, and in both of my concepts I'd use shades of blue to bring that idea over into the cover art as well.

For the first idea, I'd import an image of Baker for the front cover, probably with something like 50 percent opacity to give it a ghostly feel.

For the second, I'd feature a trumpet instead of an image of Baker, but I would give it the same treatment. I'd use his image on the back, and I'd take a different approach with the text on the back too, as shown.

Social Awareness Poster: Not This Time

Here's my final poster (click to get a bigger, better look).

I decided to go with the suggestions to use my own drawings for the faces like I did in the sketch instead of using actual photos. I think it was a good suggestion, I wouldn't have thought of it otherwise, but I feel like it adds a nice touch. I used the brush tool to do the sketches over from scratch. It was the first time I'd used it so it took a little getting used to but I feel like it turned out OK.

I decided to keep all the elements as simple as possible and not have anything in the background.

I felt like one of the most important things was decided which font to use for the text, so I literally went through every single font for both types I used to figure out which one seemed to work the best.

I had a little trouble getting the right level of opacity in order to blend the three images on the bottom. I don't feel like it looks quite right, it seems a little clumsy-looking to me, I wonder if there would have been a better way to go about it.

Social Change Poster Project: "Not This Time"

Here's the main layout sketch for my poster, which I'm giving the working title "Not This Time." The text is: First they came for the Muslims...and we said, "Not THIS Time, Motherfucker." On the top left will be images of the faces of Hitler and Trump (not too subtle, eh?) with some opacity added. Underneath the last line of text will be an American flag, Islamic symbol and Star of David interposed over each other.

Below is a closeup of the Hitler and Trump faces visible behind the lettering.

And finally, here is a closeup of the flag, Islamic symbol, and Star of David superimposed over each other: