Designing a Cover for Intermediate JavaScript

If you follow the Elementary JavaScript book page on Facebook or Instagram, you will have seen that Ahan, my 10 year old son, and I have started on the second book in the series called Intermediate JavaScript.

One of the things that Ahan helped me with on the first book was cover design. This time around he is helping me actually write the book. We have started making a game using Phaser, a new version of a game he made some time back called Blob Attack.

This morning we took a break from writing the book and making his game to design the cover for the book. We spent an hour this morning looking at a lot of online articles on designing a book cover. Then we went through hundreds of images of book covers to see why our first cover did not look like a professionally designed cover.

We discovered various things:

• Our font choice just did not look nice. Modern books have finer fonts.
• The contrast was jarring.
• My drawing was amateurish (but we’re still keeping it here to stay with the theme).
• Even books with solid colors for their cover have slight gradients or at least some kind of dividing lines.

We brainstormed some ideas and what we came up with is to write the title on a computer screen and our names as the keyboard keys. Keeping with the previous book’s strategy of using PowerPoint shapes to design the whole thing, this is what we have as our second draft of the cover.

As usual I learned something new in PowerPoint – that you can create perspective by using the “3-D Rotation options” in “Shape Effects” in PowerPoint.

I’ve updated the cover for the eBook for Elementary JavaScript to match. It will propagate to all eBook stores over the next week.

Let us know what you think!