The first submission I would like to direct your attention to is my book cover redesign for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Warrior of Light: a manual, The Witch of Portabello, as well as The Zahir. Although I have read the alchemist, I have not read through the whole entirety of the latter three save for the at least the summaries for the following books I had attempted to capture the essence of the rest of the books. In so doing I found that it was best to reduce the Image of the books to their most basic elements:

The Zahir is a story about passion, love and mystery etc. An abstract image of an ink cloud in water was used so that it resembled a magenta floral pattern, much like a bouquet of flowers. (See the close up of the images for a more complete summary of the contents of the book.)

Next, The Witch of Portabello is a story about a good witch, a prophetess, a seer not to be confused with the stereotypical bad witch that might immediately come to mind so I used an expressionistic image in light-green to depict nature, grass and green pastures with thick brush strokes to exemplify it.

Then again in The Manual of the Warrior of Light; I used oriental characters to illustrate the simplicity of the Zen-like wisdom held within its pages. As with the symbol for mountain on the front page for solid dedication, discipline and resolve, the gesture for river was also used for fluidity, flexibility and change.

Finally–in The Alchemist, colored smoke was used to represent alchemy the process of changing lead into gold and a person’s life into a success. Not that a life changing event is a chemical process but that a combination of trial, error and the willingness to take risks and constantly make different decisions until the right ones produce the desired results.

Earlier on in my research, upon gathering previous versions on the covers of the titles I had been looking for, I noticed that there were a plethora of book jackets that implemented the use of photography quite extensively and there were a few who used illustration. I noticed that the covers were either relatively simple water-color-like scene’s where some were vague non-specific monochromatic settings in far away lands and others were high key, or else fully saturated front covers. Given many of the same titles had been designed differently all over the world, when viewed together there is not necessarily one common element that tied them all together. A singular constant besides the authors name is something to be desired.

If unless the reader wasn't already familiar with the author it might be difficult to determine what of the other books were by the same author. Although they are not in a series, in order to establish some consistency, format and layout of the book covers were used to unify the a set of 4. Fields of black are used equally and all across the board taking up a third of the page on the front and two-thirds on the back making way for text and image to be set in place with out any one taking precedence over the other–simultaneously conveying the information necessary to interest the reader. A combination of photo’s, photographic manipulation as well as electronic illustration are used to create a variety of book jacket covers establishing a consistency of inconsistency in composition while at the same time maintaining the structure in format and layout increasing visual recognizability.