• C$200

• 43 designs

• 8 designers

---

Book Cover Design Brief

I'm looking for a cover (including front back and spine) for a young adult novel.

SYNOPSIS
Every year on the same date for three years, six high-school students have vanished. This year, Erica and five other students are abducted from their homes and imprisoned in an austere white room containing nothing but mattresses, a curtained off washroom, and dumbwaiter that delivers meals. They crack the electronic lock on the door to discover a spiral staircase that leads to a room containing a cougar. They make it past the cougar only to find more rooms--all very austere--with various threats that they must overcome to try to escape.

Once they start, the reader is intended to be compelled to continue reading the novel because of curiosity about what will be behind the next door and to learn the answer to the core mystery--why the students were abducted.

Target Market(s)

Gender-neutral young adult adventure/sci-fi genre (but not an obvious sci-fi focus for the cover)

Industry/Entity Type

Adult

---

Font styles to use

---

Look and feel

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

---

Requirements

Must have

• - Title: "The Battlefield Abductions"
• - Author: R. B. Gibbons
• - 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

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
• - Implications of a story or some sort of puzzle/mystery
• - Title readable in thumbnail (Don't care much about the author)
• - A compelling focal point
• - Optical illusions that make the thumbnail have a different image from full size image, like the woman's face in this image: http://brainden.com/images/flowers-face.jpg, but more threatening and on theme (this is an unreasonable ask, so it isn't expected)
• SOME POSSIBLE IMAGERY (but I'm not stuck on any of this):
• - Four white panels in a white room, the right-most of which is dripping blood. Behind each panel is a knob (which when pulled opens a door) and some threat. One panel is rotting, maggot-riddled meat, one encloses bees. The one with the dripping blood has a guillotine.
• - Something like a 3-dimensional blueprint, a stylized tower of rooms, connected by spiral staircases, with threats in some of the rooms (in the novel, these include a cougar, a black pyramid with a silver tip that shoots gas, several large white cubes, soldiers in dark outfits with Taser-like weapons that look like pen-lights, narrow rusty ramps above a large drop, the panels). Different threats could be used, or something metaphorical. Basically whatever is engaging
• - Labyrinth-like imagery
• - Syringe (or possibly an optical illusion that looks like a syringe in the thumbnail, but is composed of other threatening objects laid out in a syringe-like shape)
• - Locked door in a white cell (or padded room) with blood on the wall

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