Square Button Books

Below is some of the final artwork I created as the fake Designer/Art Director

for our fake children's publishing house, Square Button Books in the very real

Columbia Publishing Course book workshop.

In eight days, we divided into 'houses', decided on our job positions/areas: 

Publisher, Editor(s), Sales, Business Manager, Designer, Production, 

Marketing, Publicity, and Subsidiary Rights

We have to develop almost 30 book ideas, whittling it down to six final titles.

With these books, each person has specific tasks to perform and include in the

final product: A Prospectus of our house's Fall 2014 list.

The horizontal version of our logo.

The cover design for our final prospectus.

**My cover design for our (fake) Mindy Kaling book for teen girls,

complete with my handwriting! 

I wish this book were real. I'd totally read it.

Our editors got to contact her agent to get permission to make our fake title.

**This book went through so many changes, my whole group (including myself)

were ready to scream. I'm relatively pleased with how this turned out

even though it is different from our original look.

Shakespeare meets Gossip Girl...

My cover for the first book of our Middle Grade boys' series, Pegleg Academy.

The final cover does not include the series title and instead just says

the individual book's final title: 

Sticks and Stones, Skulls and Bones

I had fun making the skull out of paper from my notebook and snapping

pictures of it on my phone in my dorm room late at night.

Harry Potter meets Treasure Island.

I illustrated this cover myself roughly in the style of the wonderful Brian Biggs.

We were allowed to use existing illustrations for our fake book covers 

during this workshop, but I thought this one needed

an original image (because there was nothing available to fit this particular title).

I thoroughly enjoyed getting so use my illustration background during

the book workshop.

Our editors contacted Helen Ketteman, who was very enthusiastic about

our proposed project!

**Now, this is a preexisting illustration done by the talented Sara Palacios. 

I borrowed it for this project and doctored it slightly, deleting, moving

 and adding things so that it will better suit the cover.

This was a picture book idea based around Sandra Cisneros' poem.

**Here is my cover design for our (fake) picture book based on the Instagram sensations: 

Tasuku and his best friend, Muu. 

Our resource team - a group of publishing professionals who graciously

donated their time to instruct us during our workshop -

suggested that I "brand" Tasuku & Muu, so the above title is how I interpreted that.

Thankfully, they liked it!

Thank you for looking through all of these!

Now, below are some of the earlier versions of the above titles:

The design supervisors and I fought for this cover for a long time.

Several of the people upstairs (literally upstairs) did not agree that it fit the

developing concept of the book. I appreciated that they did say it was a very good

cover before asking that it be changed 10000 times.

So, we went more modern, as was requested.

I actually didn't hate this as much as I thought I would.

It grew on me quite a bit.

Then, in an effort to try a different feel entirely, I tried a Playbill style

to allude to the Shakespeare aspect of the series. The buyer from

Barnes & Noble liked my Playbill cover a lot, but

she ultimately liked the original cover best, as did I.

That yellow is rough.

This was used in one of our sales packets. 

My teammate asked me to make a coloring book page of Tasuku & Muu.

This was one of my brainstorming results for a logo design. Way too corporate. 

I disliked it instantly. I found a happy medium between this

design and another, resulting in the final logo.

**I do not own the rights to this photo. As this was merely

an educational exercise, I made no financial profits from the image(s).