The Tree of Life basic shape is still an idea for a simple book. I may try and cut out the shape of the tree and try it as a raised image to see how it would look covered in paper rather than in leather.
Original Post: 7.15.11 For one of the next books that I'm making, I wanted to try a new design for the front cover. The book is going to be a Double-Fold, size 5, book with a section of white pages for the main book and black pages for the interior, or secondary book.
The front cover will have a raised element of a tree-of-life with the hollow sections revealing either glass or some kind of 'glossy' material. I'm not sure if the sub-surface color will be black, white or green but I sketched up some ideas (right) to see what it would look like.
I really liked how numbers 1 and 4 turned out because it left a lot of empty space that I can use to show off the tree design that's raised. Number 1 is very stylistic and you have know that you're looking at a tree to realize what the design is (in my opinion). Number four has a lot of the 'tree' qualities that I'm looking for in the design and there's no mistaking it for some other shape when it's raised off the front of the book's cover.
The problem is that it's asymmetrical and I generally like my books to look 'balanced'. Additionally, the thin 'branches' on the side would probably not stand up to the wear and tear that most of my books are put through so I would need to fatten them up for a finished design.
Since I wanted to keep the design from #4 but add some thickness to the branches, I took concept and re-drew it and then mirrored it so that it would be symmetrical. The shaded areas would easily show the green or black backing material that I had in mind although I might thin down the top of the trunk a little.
Additionally, the surrounding 'ring' of the tree design will be given an added later to bring it out as a design element on the cover and I need to stretch the design of the tree to make it more ovoid than a flat-circle. So I needed to scan in the image and play with it in Gimp a bit to figure out what kind of variations I could try with the colors and design.
Once I had plenty of variations with the color of the tree, background and possible cover I couldn't decide on what version I liked better so I put them together in a concept-design video. I had been meaning to implement this on some of the bigger projects, documenting the whole process by which a book was created so that future clients could see the design process as well as what types of elements were possible.
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