A Little Closer: A Senior Narrative Book Jacket by Michaella Gumila (2017)

My book jacket presents a short story I wrote about a guy in a very dissociative state. one night, he ends up driving to a cliff in the middle of the night. So on my book jacket, a drew a silhouette of a car on a cliff on top of a starry night sky background to symbolize the setting of my book. The lone car silhouette also represents my main character’s isolation and loneliness. While I used a dark color scheme to create this solemn but mysterious mood. I think my book jacket is successful at accurately representing my book and giving people who see it and haven’t read my story a good idea of what it is about.

To create my book jacket, I used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I came across some struggles, for example, I envisioned my book jacket with a photograph of a cliff side view from the inside of a car dashboard and simplistic white text. However, I didn’t get the opportunity to drive to the beach and shoot photographs of cliff sides. But I believe I grew by being forced to improvise. I followed a youtube tutorial to make a starry galaxy texture for the background and learned how to manipulate effects like outer glow and how to use the brush tool in Photoshop. And for my Publishing house logo, I used a combination of the shape tool, the pen tool and the brush tool in Adobe Illustrator.