This is the first poetry collection in a series, all penned by a doctor in the Salt Lake City area. He asked me to use some landscape photos he had taken, so I built the cover design around that. Each volume in the series will have the same cover, but with a different photo and color scheme to match. So far the first three volumes are red, blue, and purple. He’s got a large corpus of poems, so I might have the chance to do green and yellow ones, too.

On the interior pages, I put a flourish across the top of the page header and at the beginning of each section. I used those same flourishes for the cover, enlarging them and making them the same shade of burgundy-maroon as the background, tinting them slightly darker (front cover) or lighter (spine). This gave the book a touch of elegance that matches its poetic content, as well as continuity with the interior pages. It also made me hungry for strawberry syrup swirled in chocolate whenever I looked at the spine.

There were some special considerations for this book. The author told me that he would be giving many copies to friends who were elderly, so I increased the font size of the body text. You would normally want to use about 10–12 pt font size for a book’s body text, but for his purposes I used 14 pt. It makes it look a bit like a Reader’s Digest edition of classic novels, but then they’re aimed at a similar demographic, so that makes sense.

Above are the covers of volumes two and three. Again, the author wanted to use photos he had taken as the front cover images. I decided to design the next covers blue and green so that they not only matched the color palette of the deep red of the first volume, but also matched the colors of their respective photographs.