Final Book Cover

While I was putting off working on the final editing of Infused, I decided to give the cover design another go.

After looking around the web for space pictures, I quickly found that NASA provides many photos that can be used by the public and business sector without any fees. The only stipulation is that if the photos are used for commercial purposes, a disclaimer should be given stating that NASA does not endorse the product.

After looking around the NASA site for a while, I found a nice moonscape picture that didn’t look at blurry as those from the 1960’s, a star field shot, and a picture of Earth with a hurricane off the North Carolina coast. The Hurricane was a nice touch because in the story Geoff goes to the moon after seeing a satellite picture of a similar hurricane on the news.

I initially tried to make the cover picture more proportionally correct – I made the Earth fairly small. I started with the star field as a background and then placed the moonscape at the bottom (of course). Next I placed the smallish Earth near the top. I had not pursued getting a photo of anyone else, so I used the picture of myself that I had used in my earlier attempt, and placed it so that it looked like I was standing on the moon.  Next, I Put the title “Infused” in red letters in between the picture of me and the Earth.

Unfortunately there were a couple of issues with this attempt. My dark hair seemed to dissolve into the star field and several people that saw it thought that it wasn’t very menacing looking with the Earth being so small and far away. Also, I realized that I once again forgot to stretch out the picture of myself to match Geoff’s height.

For the next attempt, I backed up a few steps in putting the images together and moved the Earth into the center of the image and made it much larger. This made it so that my hair was clearly visible against the lighter colors of the Earth (after I stretched the picture of myself the correct amount to make me appear to be 6’ 3”). I then put the title above the Earth.

I felt that the resulting combination of the images turned out quite well, although there are a few issues. The light on the Earth and the Moon are coming from the right side, whereas the light on me was from the left – it’s not a big deal, but it is a bit off if you look at it too closely. The other issues are mainly with scale. I’m certain that the part of the moon in the picture is huge compared to the size of a human, and of course the Earth is way too large compared to the picture of me. But, overall I think it is a pleasing picture and I think that it ended up looking great on the printed version of Infused.