I started at Quirk at the beginning of May 2008 and was approached by our head designer Grant McLachlan to come up with a fresh and new approach to the Quirk textbook - eMarketing: the essential guide to online marketing - cover. The team here had been struggling for a few months to find a cover design that they were happy with - one that would represent the quality of work and fresh thinking that Quirk is known for.

Craig, our CTO, set up a meeting to explain an idea he came up with, where Internet themed keywords would be used to fill up the cover. In the meeting we discussed the possibility of wrapping the words/ cover around a sphere, I fell in love with this idea and went straight to the drawing board.

This is the first draft I came up with after my meeting with Craig, I took his sphere idea and incorporated a world map into a desk top globe.

I sent this draft through and the overall reaction was good, however the main “problem” with the draft was that the focus was on the globe and not on the keywords.

Having the initial concept clear in my head I set out to create the whole world in keywords and letters. This task was not simple, as I had to individually tweak and shape each word to fit it on the surface of the sphere (X + Y +Z).

After a long night on 3d Studio Max and many cups of coffee, I could start to see the concept coming to life - looking good and working very well.

The world was complete with the desired keywords inserted, I depicted the final version of the globe from the front view.  However, the “world” was quite flat and needed to have an element of shading and softness to complement the level of the globe.

 I used photoshop to add the desired look and feel to the image, using shadow maps and shading I created the round look. I also adjusted the hue and saturation of the text to make it complement the white background.

After the cover image was complete I needed to design the rest of the book cover, front, spine back and fold out sleeves.

Sarah gave me some great ideas and feedback for the way she desired the rest of the cover to be designed. She wanted the text to be “Quirky” so I used the DIN font style in dark blue and incorporated some orange to bring contrast to the text.

The final product.

In conclusion I would like to say that this was one of the most challenging, demanding yet rewarding projects I have ever worked on. Our team here at Quirk were amazing and very supportive in terms of ideas and creativity. I’m so proud and happy that the text book cover worked out the way it did, and if I had to do it all over again I would not change a single thing.