52 Reasons to Hate My Father

I’ve been working with the talented author  Jessica Brody for three years now and with each one of her projects comes a plethora of awesome designs to promote her book releases. It’s always a fun challenge to work on promoting one of her books because not only is she a wonderful author, she’s a great marketer too. She’ll email me ideas and I’ll get to work designing them into reality. We’ll work on everything from posters and book samplers to websites and props for her book trailers.

Book Trailers

Her book trailers are definitely something special as they give the audience a visual to go with her books. We all create images in our minds as we read. Jessica takes this to the next level and brings her characters to life through Hollywood style book trailers. And why not? It works great for the movies, why not books too?

Our latest projects center around her new book, 52 Reasons to Hate My Father. The book is about a spoiled teen heiress who is famous for her party-girl antics and tabloid headlines. She is forced by her ever-absent mogul father to take on a different low-wage job every week for a year, if she wants any hope of receiving her trust fund. The 2:44 trailer features everything you’d expect in a Hollywood movie trailer complete with actors hand selected by Jessica to match her characters from the book.

Design for Film

In addition to designing book samplers and bookmarks (look for these to appear in upcoming tutorials) for her book release on July 3, 2012, Jessica and I worked on a t-shirt and photo mockup especially for her trailer. One of the greatest rewards of graphic design is the various ways design can be implemented across many mediums. Jessica’s projects taught me that a design can move from a traditional printed form like a book to film and the web.

Don’t be afraid to explore alternatives for your designs. You may be surprised how you can apply them to a new project.