Hi everyone,
the book has gone to print now. All the work is done- for now. There’ll be promotional things to do later on, and a launch in a few months- but for now we can relax a little and await the finished product. Soon, Norm and I will be holding advance copies of The Last Viking and giggling like it’s Christmas.
Originally I’d intended only three posts in this series showing the development of the cover- but, there’s some final changes to show.
Book designer extraordinaire Tracey Gibbs finished her work on The Last Viking last week. She added the text to all the pages, cleaned up images, and adjusted the cover.
Here’s what the cover looked like in the last post:
…and here’s what it looks like now.
I love it, I think it looks much better. You can see the title text is slightly smaller and a different colour now. Our names are bigger. Tracey has also increased the brightness and saturation of the colours. (We may have a ‘spot varnish’ on the printed cover- where certain parts will have a glossy coating added).
Here’s a closer look at the front cover:
If you look back at the first image, you may notice that Tracey added in the design for the spine of the book. Here it is on its own:
Spine designs are a very important part of the cover. Why do you think this is? (**hint- what parts of the book will people see first?)
Why do you think Tracey chose red and orange stripes? Why do you think she chose to colour the words in white?
James Foley 
Well done guys – and Tracey. It looks fabulous. Can’t wait to read the story.
James, this looks AMAZING!! You should all be very proud (and giggly too!).
Looks awesome!! 🙂 The red and orange stripes on the spine design reflect the viking shield on the cover, and they also grab your immediate attention as they are eye catching colours. The writing in white is also very easy to read, being fairly small characters, I think any other colours would have been harder to read. All in all I think it looks like a fun book to read ,even if you were only going by the cover!