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Moonwalker
I was asked by Mark Jones Jr. to create a new cover for the ebook version of Charlie Duke’s classic Moonwalker, his story of working with NASA and being the youngest person to walk on the moon.
My client was looking for an aesthetic modeled on the Domino Project, which has a rule that no text is to be printed on the covers of its books (the one exception being Al Pitanpali’s Read this Before Our Next Meeting). The only exception for the Moonwalker cover would be the logo of the publisher, Rose Petal Press.
I thought immediately of the famous Earthrise image, the first picture of the earth taken from space. The image is iconic culturally, marking a shift in perspective and confidence in the power of human achievement. I cropped the image to optimize the dimensions for Amazon’s .epub format, and arranged it so that the surface of the moon would fill the foreground, while the earth and publisher logo would hang together in the balance of the ‘black space.’ The overall effect puts the viewer in a position that identifies with the title of the book in being similar to what one might see walking on the surface of the moon.
Here’s what Mark had to say:
I first saw Ty’s graphic design work on the website of a mutual business colleague several months ago as was delighted with the quality and creativity of the work. Recently, when I needed some graphic design work for a digital book cover, Tyler was one of the first that came to mind. He was capable of not only the book cover but also several other related web applications that could spring up as a result of the book publication. Furthermore, I had several technical questions about the graphics work that he answered without me even asking them–details about the resolution and size requirements that Amazon had for digital book covers.
He completed the work very quickly, very efficiently, and at a very reasonable cost. He quoted me a price based on the specifics of the project–other companies had a standard digital book cover fee they quoted without getting any details of my project. When I wanted to see some variations of his design, he quickly accommodated. I ended up choosing his first proposal, not the variations I asked about.
