Zombies for Zombies: Cover Design

Ain't she a beaut? This, my friends, is the single largest preoccupation of my time for the last year made incarnate. Zombies for Zombies: Advice and Etiquette for the Living Dead was written by one of my oldest and dearest friends David Murphy. It's the world's first self-help book for the recently bitten. It's a terrific book, and you all owe it yourself (and me) to buy a copy!

There are over 30 interior illustrations done by yours truly, but today we are going to focus on the cover design process. It was lengthy, exhaustive, and clearly worth it. It looks the way it would've looked in my head if I was a genius. So, yeah, you can say I was happy with the results. Lengthy Applause Breaks go out to the folks at Sourcebooks, Inc. for letting me not just illustrate, but layout and design the cover (and for the best use of glossy embossing since the mid 90's).

What follows is a selection of rough designs, refined sketches and finished paintings that created this, my finest book cover to date. So make with the clickety.

 

 This is the direct parody angle, and the first vision of the cover that came to mind. In my head this was THE cover design for this book. But in case the editors disagreed, we created a completely different cover design:

 

The cover was chosen from these roughs and notes were given.

And so armed, I marched forward into battle. Five revision passes later we have:

The refined background zombies now expanded to include a wrap-around back cover:

And the large painting that was created from that:

(click to enlarge)

And the final design with it's spiffy, new, refined type faces:

(click to the enlarge)

BOOM!

Comments

[Ben U]

The final cover is great, good job!