Cover Designs

Before designing the inspire and express book covers, I had a look at what colour tattoos were the most common, resulting in black being used the most (World Famous Tattoo Ink, 2023), taking this into consideration I decided that all the book covers would be designed in black and white.

For the design of the first book, I took a photo of a tattoo artist tattooing another person and used that as my focal point for the cover. To draw attention to the image, I duplicated the original photo, selected around the subject and deleted the background so when it was added on top of the original image it would stand out more.

To make the subject stand out even more I used keywords associated with the sub category and put it between the background and the foreground with a slight transparency so the words are still visible but does not take away the key focus.

The sub-category for the second book is abstract tattoos and keeping with the black and white theme for the cover image, the main image is of a tattoo gun being dipped into a pot of ink.

To further the consistency between the book covers, there is text with keywords relating to the sub category between the background and the foreground. This is not only to make the cover visually appealing, but it also allows the viewer to see what style of art is being covered and if they are looking for a key word such as ‘line art’, they can see if that word or a synonym appears on the cover.

The third book cover has a sub category relating to HR Geiger tattoos, this is because the tattoo book series will cover a variety of different designs such as Disney and gaming tattoos and having a book with this style of sub- category will allow people to understand how to adapt their favourite artists artwork into a more unique tattoo instead of a replica and that there will be more books which may be written about their favourite artists.

Instead of having a specific author on the title of each cover page, the area where the name should be has been left as author, this is because having a name on the cover is not necessary as it is written by the publishing company and anyone associated with creating the books will be credited within the book itself.

All images that have been used have been taken by me at a local tattoo shop which were then photoshopped to become black and white.

I did not create a font for the covers as the key design influence within the book is the images and the art being created, having a personalised font would take away from the emotion within the images and would result in some of the covers being unbalanced as both the text and images would be fighting for the focal point.