SIR RICHARD OWEN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Cover Design,
Layout D
esign, Logo Design
Mock-up done for fun
Objective: Design a book for an autobiography revolving around Sir Richard Owen making sure to include dinosaur imagery.
As a kid, I loved dinosaurs. I even wanted to be a paleontologist for a long time. Recently, I’ve wanted to try designing things whose style lay outside of my wheelhouse, hence I decided to design some fake autobiography books. With that in mind, I immediately thought of doing something dinosaur related as it is a subject I loved since childhood. Another childhood memory that drove this project was this song I would listen to when I was a kid. It was an educational song titled Who named the Dinosaurs? This cover was designed with that song in mind.
Colorize
After acquiring a black and white photo of Sir Richard Owen, I used an online AI system to colorize the image. After fine tuning the colors and image in Photoshop, the newly colored photo was ready to use.
Pattern
Wanting to incorporate dinosaur themed imagery, I used Photoshop to design a scale texture pattern to incorporate into the final design. I designed the logo with this scale pattern in mind, eventually placing the texture into the logo via Illustrator.
I also made up a fake publishing division for this particular book, Cretaceous Period Editions, using existing educational and biography books as reference.
Silhouette
After extending the background to match the desired book dimensions, I continued with the dinosaur imagery by incorporating a T-Rex silhouette into the background. For the silhouette I took a picture of a Jurassic Park T-Rex toy and manipulated it within Photoshop.
For a bit of fun and humor, I have the T-Rex’s hand touching one of the books on the table, as if inferring to the reader to pick up and read the book.
Final Cover Design
After assembling all the cover elements together, I went about designing the back cover and the spine thus completing the wrap around for the cover.
