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.