Chad Coe’s Makeover

Are you in need of a book cover makeover? Chad Coe, the Founder and President of Coe Financial Group, Inc. needed just that when he contacted us concerning his book, The Power of Peopletizing. The former cover, which appears to the right, immediately struck us as a typical print-on-demand title, one that was seriously in need of a complete overhaul, seeing it lacks the professional touch of a seasoned cover designer (click on image to enlarge). What Chad absolutely insisted on, however, was the color of the book cover. It had to be blue—his favorite color. We immediately went to work and started an exhaustive image search for stock photos containing the blue hues we figured he had in mind for the cover.

Initially, we sent him several samples of blue energy-effects backgrounds, all of which he rejected, and after having him answer several key questions, we decided to blend a background of blue gradients from scratch. This was the foundation for our cover. And the end result was highly acceptable to Chad. Since the book fell into the reference category, we decided to use a circle motif for the front cover title, a throwback to the classic Merriam-Webster dictionaries, which employ a similar design. At left you'll find the Scribe Freelance makeover (click to enlarge).

The Vietnam Vet

We were contacted by a Vietnam veteran who was interested in having an interior layout done, along with a cover design for a novel he had written some years ago. Our client insisted on using several photos that he had in his possession. The front cover had to incorporate these images. Once we started to tinker with the cover itself, playing around with ideas for framing the basic layout and so forth, we realized that the images were too washed out and unprofessional in nature to be suitable for a glossy looking book cover.

Almost everyone is familiar with the stigma that surrounds print-on-demand (POD) books, which usually display covers that either lack imagination or skill. We didn’t want this cover to look like anything POD. We strive for the look of books published by big publishing houses the likes of Simon and Schuster, St. Martin’s Press, etc. So, instead of leaving the images in color, we decided to grayscale them and add a few enhancements to make them cover-friendly. One image, which features a statue of a soldier (pictured right), was isolated and beefed up for effect. The results appear below (click to enlarge).

We at Scribe Freelance do our best to meet our clients’ needs and/or demands as we create quality products that readers will be happy to pay their hard earned money for.

If you would like to partner with us for your next project, be it a book cover or professional grade interior layout, please feel free to contact us for more details. Your next high quality book is an email away!