AUDIOBOOK COVER DESIGNS
My experience with audiobook cover design was a game revolving around a constant quantity of output.
Some notable accomplishments while in this role were that my cover for Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero was the named the goriest cover the company had ever released (at that time), completing a watercolor illustration and the design for a cover in three hours, and completing four book covers (including 3 media type variations for each cover) in one day.
FORMAT ITTERATIONS
One fun obstacle when creating audiobook covers is the need to create the audio CD, cassette tape, and MP3 DVD versions for every title, each format having drastically different dimensions from the other.
You might have thought that cassette tapes were a thing of the past, but they are still in demand from both consumers and the public library system.
SHELF LIFE
I believe that too often, design is approached solely from the viewpoint of sales, but it is also important to look at a product from the perspective of the person who will live with it. How a book will be housed is one of my favorite parts of the design process.
Uniformity within a series (as viewed in the Marsh books below) can not only speed up the design process but creates a more pleasing shelf space and can help promote brand loyalty. In addition, a book broken into parts (also viewed below in Peter the Great – Parts I & II) allows for the imagery to be continued across multiple volumes.
