Recently I had an idea. I thought to myself, what if I could choose an alternative to some of these covers that I've seen about. As my first point of call in a bookshop, I like covers to be able to stand out and make me want to read the story inside. Sadly not all covers can be amazing. I'm not a huge fan of face covers as many of you know, and sometimes the initial design of a cover doesn't really tell me anything about the story...
So, this is going to be the beginning of what I think will be a long feature on my blog, depending if I have enough time/ can be motivated enough. I am going to be redesigning current covers of books. Now these will most likely be books that I really admire and enjoy looking at but there will be a few covers that I wish I could do over - however these will be clearly stated.
Today, I have two redesigned book covers for you guys: A Malmont Summer by Joshua J. Johnson and Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. I love both of these book covers so it was difficult for me to try and adapt them.
A Malmont Summer by Joshua J. Johnson
Now I really enjoy the cover for A Malmont Summer and Joshua has released the information that he feels it reflects the tones of the book well, especially the colour schemes - so this is something that I really wanted to play around with.
For the first cover design I found the original picture Joshua used for his background and then brightened up the colours a bit to make them a bit less dynamic. I did this so that the title and author name could really stand out. Although I love Joshua's choice of font, unfortunately I couldn't find to it on my laptop, so I chose another one that reminds me a bit of the original font for Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson. The curvature of the letters made me feel reflected summer well. As for the author name, I wanted something bold and very contrasting - hence the capitalisation and the plain font. I think it turned out really well.
For the second cover design I wanted something completely different but I knew I wanted the silhouette kind of idea on the cover. I browsed Google until I found one I was happy with and then I played around with the hues to try and get the sky the right colour that I wanted. Once again I brought back the same fonts I used on the previous design because I really like those fonts - they're bold and dynamic and fit well as a parallel to one another. Unlike the previous design, I included Joshua's tagline. On the previous design I just felt that the cover was better plain because then you could focus more on the image and the title. However on this design it felt like something was missing so I had the idea to try and include it in, and I felt it worked really well!
Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Simon's cover was extremely tricky for me because I adore this cover and frankly I don't think it needs any improvement. Saying this, because I love it so much it gives me creative licence to mess around with it as much as I can.
So please ignore the first cover because it's terrible and it was just a template board for the real cover. I decided that I wanted to stick with a person on the cover but it was only going to be specifically their t-shirts (the stickmen were the only blank canvas I could find.) I also contemplated about having other bodies in the background, like on stage at a show. I knew on the t-shirts that Simon's had to have something to do with Oreos considering the US version of this book has Oreos on the back and the UK's doesn't. Major sad face publishers! THIS BOOK NEEDS MORE OREOS! Blue's was more difficult - because he stays anonymous for most of the book, I decided to keep him neutral and have a simple email logo with a question mark in it. Quite effective in my opinion. Obviously the show is a focus of the novel but I found it too difficult to try and fit in - hence the plain background in the end. At first I wanted to keep the bubble idea for the title but then decided to include it as an email subject to Blue from Simon. I really like this idea considering The Homosapiens Agenda is an actually email conversation they have in the book. I knew as well that I needed to keep the speech bubbles and it seemed clear to me that I would have to include the quotes from the back of the book.
So there we go guys, there are two book cover redesigns for you to oggle and discuss about. Please note I am in no way stating that I am professional, because frankly because they are just images from google, some of them have turned out horrific. This is a fun project, I'm not being serious about any of these. Let me know down in the comments which covers you think I should do next and perhaps I'll attempt them! Until next time.
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