Welcome to Adobe Photoshop, where we're going to create this book cover you see right here, the Garden
of Secrets, which is really a romance novel.
And the reason for this is I want you to get used to doing different project types because you're never
going to get assigned or have a client project or client work.
That's going to be the same each time.
They're always going to request a totally different style.
And as a designer, you need to be prepared for any type of style they request.
We're going to start off with this one first.
We're going to do our romance novel.
It's going to actually be almost entirely in Photoshop is going to be a lot of photo editing and manipulation
with this one.
And we're going to learn a lot of tricks and tools along the way.
First things first, we need to go ahead and find the right size for our romance novel, and I'm going
to go ahead and post and the resource guide, which you should have been able to download in the first
lesson of the course, just in case you have that, he'll have links to everything we're using throughout
the course in terms of photos.
But there's a really great blog article that I'm going to be able to post and has some standard book
sizes.
Of course, this is for the United States.
So if you're in Europe, that might be a little bit different.
You might have to Google this.
But the standard novela kind of romance novel size is five by eight.
So that's exactly what we're going to do as our test size.
Of course, the publisher you work with will supply you with the final sizing or the client will supply
you with the final sizing in a real project.
So for this, we're going to do five by eight.
So we're just going to open up a new document.
And do a simple five by eight size, so we're going to switch this down two inches since that sizes
and inches, we're going do five by eight, we could do a vertical orientation or a portrait size.
And we're going to make sure we're at 300 resolution.
That's incredibly important.
Don't do 72.
That's for digital stuff.
Three hundred is for print.
We want to keep that at three hundred or higher.
And let's go and go to color mode.
We're going to have this and see him with color mode.
Since it's going to be printed professionally, we always want to have it and Samwick and RGB will be
great for digital.
So white background with this.
Keep it white.
We have some advanced options.
That is totally fine.
That's a great profile to use and we are off to the races.
So here's our basic size.
We need to go ahead and hunt down a photo for our romance novel, which will be about a secret garden.
So we need to find a garden, photos, flower photos.
And a lot of times when I'm looking for photos, I like to feature people.
But sometimes when a character is not the main function of a book cover, you kind of want to find a
photo that can be a little bit enticing.
And so when it comes to book cover designs, the concept is everything.
So you really want to take some time to think about a strong concept, because when you look at a book
cover, what draws people in is the photo and how you have chosen the photo and the people that are
in it.
And these front cover images are chosen with a large amount of intentionality, there's a reason behind
these photo choices and it's all about a strong concept that will draw the viewer into reading your
book.
And there's hints about the book.
You got to really know the book, read the book, or at least ask the client what is inside the book
to kind of get to know the characters.
What's the unique story here?
How can I bring that to the front without giving away any really good hints that that the author doesn't
want to give away?
So I'm going to show you lots of different examples.
I went to my local bookstore and I took photos of what I thought were really strong covers that really
drew me in from among all the other covers.
And here's an example, the ungrateful refugee.
I love how we're going to be doing this and this project.
I love how this photo interacts with the typography.
It looks very strong.
And I'm also able to clearly read the type.
And I'm very interested in why the roots of this flower is exposed.
That's very unique and interesting, the ungrateful refugees.
So I just kind of wonder what that means.
And I want to kind of read a little bit more.
It seems intriguing.
This photo and photos can be bright and colorful.
So the limitless mind learn, lead and live without barriers.
So this is kind of talking about how how much you can expand your knowledge and how you know how your
mind is more powerful than you think.
And think of this huge thing exploding of color and how you think about creativity with this huge explosion
of color.
So this absolutely drew me.
And I love the colors used here.
I love the simple typography.
It's nice and clean.
There's wonderful type hierarchy.
So you have this nice, bold headline.
You have the sublime and then you have a very clear author's name.
And when it comes to author names, we'll get to that in a little bit.
It needs to be pretty prominent.
That's the big part of the book is who the author is.
So here's another one that uses a little bit of some illustration, it's not just a photo, they kind
of hand drew some of these little twines.
Ah, I guess you would call them something that makes this braid and see how it goes through the O and
behind the edge.
It just seems like it's really interacting with the typography and it's nice, simple and clean.
And we're going to do that in our third book cover.
We're going to be illustrating a little bit to kind of emulate something very similar to this.
And there's all sorts of effects you can apply to book covers.
This is a bevel effect, so it kind of bevels out.
You can actually feel it with your finger.
When you run your hand across the book, you can feel the texture of the bevel.
And this also has a little bit of gold foil stamping on it.
So it has a shine to it.
So it actually shines the ink itself.
So that's something we're going to probably apply to.
One of our books, maybe our romance novel can have some gold beveled typography that also has a tactile
feeling to it.
And it has this gold gold foil stamping.
This is also had this object was separated in Illustrator who, you know, whatever program they use
to illustrate this book or put this book cover together, this was done as a separate layer and carved
out because you could tell there's a bevel effect.
And so you need to isolate that layer so the printer knows where to apply all these bevels.
And so we'll get to that a little bit later.
And this one uses illustration as well, and I thought this was really interesting.
You have this woman, you have a building there, kind of setting the scene for the book itself with
the cover.
So they're kind of knowing that she lives in the building.
She's introspective, she's sad.
She's thinking about something.
You know, there's something not quite right with her.
She's kind of doesn't seem super happy.
So you're kind of setting up the novel here.
And I like how they did that with this really clean look.
It's not super detailed.
It's just a nice illustration.
And once again, that gold foil stamping as applied here on these little lines, all these little lines
that wrap around this type has his gold shine, actually has a gold foil stamping to it.
And it really stands out at the bookstore when you see all these flat designs and then you see something
shining from the light lights above and the store, you kind of see that gold shining.
It just has a really nice effect.
These effects are expensive.
So it's going to depend on how much you could spend when you do your book cover.
But they do add a lot to the cost.
So they just have to think about that.
All these little extra bevels and embossing and all these little effects do cost money.
I thought this was interesting, the hive mind, he actually kind of have this busy repeat pattern going
on, but it adds a lot because think about the hive mind.
It's there's a lot going on in the mind.
So they're kind of communicating a sense of busyness, but also a sense of order.
So business with a sense of order.
They really had a strong concept here that really kind of explaining what the book's about with their
use of illustration here.
And here's a use of photo, so we haven't seen a lot that use just pure photos, this one once again,
this is a big theme as the type of, ah, the title of the book, interacting with the type or with
the photo.
So the photo and type are kind of weaving in and out.
You see how her face is kind of covering over the A and it's interacting in this wonderful layered format.
It doesn't interfere with me reading the book title Girls with Sharp Sticks.
I have no problem reading it, even though part of the letters are covered.
So that's important.
You have a very strong author name here.
That's a different color than the title.
So there's contrast there.
They don't all blend together.
And this one was kind of my inspiration for the second health care book that we're going to be doing
together with a pill, but I like the way they use photography.
They used flat lay photography, which is top down photography.
So they have kind of the the table here as kind of what you're looking at.
And then the pills are scattered about.
Once again, you're seeing that same theme of the photo over taking the type and looking like they're
one thing.
And I thought this was a wonderful use of custom made typography.
They didn't use a computerized font choice.
They actually hand drew some illustrations and brought that in and digitized it to be able to put on
the book.
I thought this was a wonderful custom, raw kind of type that looks really good and really custom and
hand drawn.
And I really like this one.
So this is a simple, you know, photo, this is kind of a very traditional kind of book cover, you
know, so you have kind of your type here.
You have this extra big sky, which, of course, they probably Photoshopped a little bit of that because
photography almost never goes that wide.
So just like a little Photoshop here to get that to extend out.
But wonderful type usage here.
You have a nice title.
You have kind of the best seller in a different color out here.
See how that contrast works.
Really nice in a nice big author name here that goes right here in this nice space.
I think overall this this works nice.
You have this character here, but they're not so big that it's interfering with the the name.
And lastly, this one disappearing earth.
I thought this was neat because it kind of had this entire photo that took over the the book cover and
he had these little characters here.
They're they're just small enough for you to wonder who they are, what they're doing, why are they
in this big mountain?
What's happening here?
I am intrigued.
So brain maker, this is a clever kind of approach.
So you're taking what looks like a brain shape, but getting this broccoli and shaping it up and they
either took a photo of this or they took a real broccoli and did some Photoshop work where I'm not quite
sure which way they did it.
It looks like a real photo, but you can do a lot in Photoshop to make that look like the shape of a
brain.
But I thought this was a very clever, simple way to do it.
They have this nice white typeface over the photo, which contrast against all the blacktip elsewhere.
And I thought this was another kind of clever approach, so the man who couldn't stop, well, they
repeated over and over and over.
The man who couldn't stop the man.
So it kind of talks about the whole book with how they did their typography.
And I thought this was very clever.
And since it repeats itself, it sure stuck out to me.
And that sharp yellow highlighter color, I had to grab this book and see what it was about.
So let's talk about OCD, which is, you know, kind of you repeat things over and over.
And they repeated that on the book, super duper thoughtful.
This was a very thoughtful book cover.
And I thought this was great kind of a design system or when you have multiple books to have a similar
theme.
So I can tell these belong together in the same series, but yet they're different because of the different
color usage.
But I thought this was great to show you what a design system looks like, which is how you apply things
to different versions or different books but have the same system.
So it looks like they belong together.
They look branded, they look thematic.
And this is just a highly illustrative one.
And this is for those who really love to illustrate.
I have a lot of students who are very talented in illustration.
I personally am not.
I'm not an illustrator.
I probably hire someone to work with me to create a book quite like this.
But I think this was this really good and just kind of showing off some of those highly illustrated
options you could do for books.
So this is another really good example of how to use photography and book cover design and how to interlace
the headline with it as well.
So I like how they use the book Spines and they were able to stack the entire title and even the author
within the books.
I thought it was a really clever way to mix that headline or title and photography.
I thought this was really neat because of the simplicity of it.
It's not complex and it's a very simple illustration and illustration.
You could probably even do with Vector or an Adobe illustrator.
You don't have to have to be this amazing illustrator to do something like this.
This is very simple shapes.
You can totally do this.
You have all the tools and skills to do an illustrated cover like this, even if you don't feel like
you're an illustrator.
I thought the use of texture here was brilliant.
It's just this very strong, intriguing texture and it goes Tana French faithful place.
So just there's something about this texture and the color that really drew me in to this this book.
It was kind of sitting along other books that were just all white.
And to have this colored subtle background texture, it definitely made me want to pick it up and kind
of touch it and flip it over and read more about it.
So there we go, that's kind of my little dive into book covers and and kind of what to think about
when you're thinking about the concepts.
We're going to be thinking about a concept for our first one.
So now that we were able to see great ideas from real examples, I thought we dive right into our first
book right now.