• C$191

• 17 designs

• 7 designers

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Book Cover Design Brief

I'm looking for a cover, back, and spine for a young adult novel. Since this is a sequel, it should be thematically similar to cover of the first novel: http://www.designcrowd.ca/design/7955668

Synopsis:
Erica’s ability to glimpse a few seconds into the future helped her survive being kidnapped and confined in a labyrinth full of lethal traps. But now her captors claim everything they put her through was for the greater good. They want her to join an elite strike force tasked with eliminating deadly threats that nobody else can take care of.
But after what happened, can Erica believe anything her kidnappers say? And if not, what’s their real plan?
But finding those answers won’t be easy. Because Erica’s dealing with people who haven’t hesitated to kill in the past, and it looks like she’ll be hard-pressed even to survive training. She barely survives a mission to rescue hostages, only to face attempts on her life when she returns to base.

Once they start, the reader is intended to be compelled to continue reading the novel because of curiosity about the underlying goals of the kidnappers and find out who is attempting to kill Erica.

Target Market(s)

Young adult, Gender neutral

Industry/Entity Type

Publishing Company

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Look and feel

Each slider illustrates characteristics of the customer's brand and the style your logo design should communicate.

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Requirements

Must have

• Title: "The Battlefield Recruits"
• Author: R. B. Gibbons
• “Book II” on the cover and “II” at the bottom of the spine
• Front cover, back cover, and spine
• 6"x9"x0.518"
• Title and author on front and spine
• Space for 80-150 word blurb on the back cover
• Meeting CreateSpace submission requirements (https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/CoverPDF.jsp)
• Gender neutral
• “matches” the previous book in the series (e.g. fonts and general look): http://www.designcrowd.ca/design/7955668, so includes some sort of puzzle. Some possibilities I’ve thought of:
• - Sliding tile puzzle
• - Towers of Hanoi
• - Pyramid Puzzle like Rubik’s Cube, but a pyramid
• - Marble Maze Puzzle
• - Tangrams
• - Peg solitaire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_solitaire)
• - Othello
• - Tetris
• - Rubik’s snake
• - I'm also open to pretty well any other puzzle
• UPDATE: To be consistent with the first book, the font on the front cover should be Franchise Regular, all upper case.
• Also, while the images I've talked about have been pretty bloody, the cover shouldn't go overboard. This is an adventure/thriller/mystery intended for the YA market, not horror or torture porn. Thus, a bit of blood is interesting, but buckets of blood will give the viewer the wrong impression.

Nice to have

• Simple
• Non-literal
• Very readable font(s)
• Attract the eye on a crowded page, but not garish
• Delineated against a white background (i.e. on Amazon, it should stand out against Amazon’s white background)
• Title readable in thumbnail (Don't care much about the author)
• A compelling focal point
• SOME POSSIBLE IMAGERY (but I'm not stuck on any of this):
• A tablet explodes
• A character bleeding from the shoulder spins on the ground leaving a perfect bloody circle
• One character get an egg-sized tumor on his ankle. He cuts off the lower half of his own leg with a hacksaw and replaces it with a futuristic metal prosthetic
• A retractable pen with a needle that can deliver poison
• A character mixes a sky-blue barbituate in a beaker
• Everything a particular character examines glows.
• Black-suited soldiers
• Several characters fall into a concrete pond inside a dam including a teenage girl who is bleeding from two gunshot wounds
• Several characters in scuba gear
• Inside a 15-foot diameter water-filled pipe, ripping out fingernails clawing to get out
• One character can make bone spikes grown in any direction (usually piercing her skin in the process causing her to bleed) At one point, the character has grown mismatched bone armor over her entire body
• A medical circular saw used for cutting bone (like this http://www.dymaxionweb.com/kulturedrome/Plaster-Saw-Elektronic-Powe-300x171.jpg)
• One character makes a variety of shapes out of metal such as spheres, cubes, hearts, and spikes. These shapes disintegrate into dust when they leave his hand
• Taser-like weapons about the size of a penlight with barbed prongs
• Villains dressed in street clothes wearing shiny sunglasses
• A stuffed animal that’s a donkey
• A middle aged man is tied first to an office chair, and then a dining room chair
• Snipers in a residential neighborhood
• A tattoo on a 16-year-old girl's neck of a screaming head imprisoned in the bottom half of an hourglass as it slowly fills with sand
• A character uses a scalpel to extract shards of glass from another character’s back
• Chlorine is emitted from holes in the ceiling of an elevator in an attempt to kill several teenagers
• Other weapons mentioned include handguns, throwing knives, and a stiletto
• A very strong, large female character is caught in an elevator door as it ascends (eventually with her legs inside and body outside.)
• Forcing open doors with a mechanical breaching tool
• Smashing through a reinforced steel garage door with an Abrams tank
• A bald teenager with a rectangular bulge on the back of his head from a cell-phone inserted under his skin
• Hanging IV bags

Should not have

• This is not a strict requirement, but I often dislike photos, or at least images that look like a bunch of stock photos poorly Photoshopped together