On October 26th I will be turning 26! Golden birthday!
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Here Be Dragons!
For my Book Design class this term, I had to design an entire book (it was awesome!) so here are the cover comps I came up with:
This first one had some nice elements, but it looked a bit old for the target audience of this book (middle-grade level readers).
I really liked this design as well, but it looks like an adult book.
Here’s the final! I made some suggested improvements, like handlettering the text on the cover and adding the dragon’s arms to hold the banner. I obviously redrew the front and back illustrations as well, and added some cracks around the dragon butt to add to the illusion of the dragon breaking through the back of the book cover. My classmates liked where the colors bled outside the lines in the comp, so I replicated that in the final. I moved the ISBN box to a more sensible place as well.
I had some trouble finding reference images for the dragon’s butt, but as multiple people reminded me, dragons aren’t real so I could draw it however I liked.
Ooligan Press Blog Branding
I’ve completed my first year of grad school. Crazy! The next few months are going to be relatively light, responsibility-wise, so expect to see new material pop up in your news feeds on a regular basis. Unless I get really lazy this summer…
Anyway, what follows are some blog badges I created for the student-run publisher I work for, Ooligan Press. We’re working on rebranding the Press and changing up the website, and my silly little doodles are part of it all.
First time around I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, which made everything graphic and clean, but these were missing the hand-drawn/human element that is an integral part of the press’ identity.
You may notice I was roped into creating a few more badges. This is not the last you’ll see of the Ooligan-related work I did this term.