Whew! After all of the great feedback and comments on the cover concepts, we dialed in the final cover layout, colors, and elements.
Color wise, the blue gradient was by far the winner, and title wise the large text was a win. Y’all didn’t like the styling of the superhero figure or “his” masculinity. Nobody liked the subtitle being “broken through” by the superhero.
There was mixed feedback on the growth from the pile of coins imagery and the overplayed American football “playbook” drawing of Xs and Os. In fact, as I turned and looked through my bookshelf, without even trying hard, I quickly found FOUR books all using the X and O playbook imagery – one of them being a book that I wrote years ago!
Taking into account the votes, but more importantly the really helpful commentary, we finalized the layout with ONE big question remaining… What would be the illustration?
Most growth illustrations are vertical, but we had a horizontal space to fill below the subtitle and above my name.
I wanted something clear, easy to instantly understand, clean/simple, emotional, relatable, a little playful, and lastly, growth and/or breakthrough related.
The challenge is that if growth isn’t represented vertically, it’s at least shown growing from left to right. For example:
- The “hockey stick” curve that goes up and to the right. 📈
- A seed, sprouting, growing its first leaf, and then sprouting up and growing stronger in a series from left to right. 🌱
- A “bar graph” of money starting as a small pile and growing higher to the right. 💵
All of these “getting bigger to the right” concepts end up “imbalanced” with more visual weight on the right than the left. And this is for a cover where everything is centered and balanced. It just wasn’t working.
After many rounds of concepts and ideation, we landed on these three illustration concepts.
The colors, layout, and text are all locked in. The question is: which of the three illustrations do we like best and why?