Coverpage Design

For the cover of my booklet I wanted to create something eye catching and related to the theme. Because Dead malls feature so much architecture from the 70s and 80s I wanted to incorporate that into the front cover design. I was inspired mainly by the vapor wave and outrun aesthetics that frequently use technology, culture and motifs from the 80s, and I thought it would work well to appeal to people and get them to pick it up and look through it.

One staple of Vaporwave and outrun aesthetics is bright colours and gridlines, which I encorperated into the base background of the cover. I also added in a gradient to give it a sense of dissapearing off into the horizon, as well as perspective warping the grid to give it a similar illusion.

Another common motif found in this genre of art is Mesh/grid mountains, which I created using a royalty free image of mountains which I then drew on top of on another layer using the line tool in photoshop. Once I had drawn two peaks I used the copy and transform tool to make duplicates to fill the horizon line.

After that I added a duplicate layer and set it to lighter colour and shifted the mountains a few pixels to the side and down to create somewhat of a 3D effect. I also added a pink gradient line and stars to the background to give the page a little extra detail. The page above would become the back cover, however I wanted to add some more detail to the front.

In the center I placed a Gradiented sun with a pink colour scheme. Throughout my booklet I found a lot of art pieces I created had those two colours frequently so I wanted to create a link between the contents of the book and the front cover. For the text I gave the words a drop shadow to add more depth to the page, as well as a reflected version of the title. I found that since so much of the page was already blue I would go with a pink/white title to make it contrast against the background, making it eye catching and easier to read from a distance.