Hey guys! I'll submit my first entry here.
My name is Arpi and I am a last yearer at a commercial graphics university. I do this besides poker (or play poker besides this I don't really know
) and I really enjoy it. I basically study about logo making, brand and web-design, book illustration/cover designs, poster and commercial designs so if you guys want anything else I'm here to help.
I wanted to make the whole thing really "vegasy" so I got inspired by the "Welcome to the fabulous Las Vegas" sign. (note that no part of the actual sign was used at any point)
Some of my ideas behind the design:
The Front Cover:
All the texts on the front cover are sorted in order of importance regarding text-size and text-effect for the potential customer.
The main title
(Further Limit Hold 'em) has a shiny and glowy neon look, also its the biggest of all the texts.
"Exploring the Model Poker Game" is the second biggest, having a red-to-orange gradient (hence red is the most eye-catching color scientifically proven!
) to make it pop for potential viewers.
Its hard to decide which of the 2 texts are more important - "Further Limit Hold 'em" or "Exploring the Model Poker". Because of this there are no significant differences in text-size or in text-attractivity. (Further Limit Hold 'em though is like 10-15% more attractive to the eye I'd say)
The author's line
"by Philip Newall" is written in a comfortable hand-written style which gives a nice little "authorish" feeling to it. Also the sky blue color makes it less of an impact to the viewer's eye thus giving it the lowest importance level of all the texts on the front cover.
I added an Ace-King to the front cover because I felt like the cover got too detached from Texas Hold 'em and this little addition pulls it back towards it.
(this is optional and can be taken out if considered unnecessary)
The background has a nice warm "lightbulb-blur" effect giving the cover an extra layer of shininess.
The obligatory chip stack repositioned to the middle and also recolored to be a bit more conservative (gets the least attention but still is in the center)
The Spine:
The spine has the same text effects going on as the front cover thus continuing an identical style for the book. This makes the book easily locatable even on a bookshelf.
The Back Cover:
The number one priority regarding the back cover was to create as much writing space as possible. The textholder has a very minimal setup having a simple shiny border and a further blurred plus darkened background to increase readability. In the posted picture the textholder contains 357 words and as you can see the used fontsize is not even small at all.
Some further notes:
- All the objects on the cover were hand-drawn by me so there won't be any © problems there.
- Also all fonts were taken from Google Web Fonts. (
http://www.google.com/webfonts) These fonts are free for commercial use for everyone (Google bought a worldwide free license on each font there - how nice of them
) So there won't be any © issues there either.
Mason or Phil if you guys want some adjustments on any part of the cover just hit me up and I'll sort it out. I am absolutely flexible regarding text positioning coloring or regarding text effect adjustments.
I will attach the .psd file if requested, also I can provide a print-ready .tiff format if necessary.
Thanks,
Arpi