Survival Guide eBook Design

Today I'm finishing the design of an ebook for Lindsey at HomemadeMommy.net. It's a great site about eating and cooking real food with loads of recipes that make me want to stop working and eat. I had the chance to try the homemade chocolate that my mother-in-law made from the recipe and it was killer. It really didn't last very long.

The book is called The Real Food Survival Guide for Busy Moms and it covers the basics of how to get started with real food for newbies with quite a lot of recipes.

I started by designing the "Survival Guide" logo for the cover. When you image search "Survival Guides" you end up with (mostly) stark and/or bland images. Typically, book covers end up with distressed or army lettering and either clip art or something symbolic to the topic. Since this book is aimed at moms, I wanted to offer something design-y, graphic and appealing to the sophisticated eye of the intended audience without resorting to pinks and pastels.

Well, the color part was dictated more by the colors of Lindsey's blog and the header there (which I also designed):

My first pass at a cover logo (before we made color decisions and before a slight name change) was not quite what Lindsey wanted and frankly was a little off concept-wise. But I'm proud of the execution. Here's the first version which was never quite finished:

So I went to the drawing board and quickly made the following sketch for myself:

Which led me to:

And Lindsey loved it!

Then came the design and pagination of the ebook which is 75 pages. 

The Real Food Survival Guide for Busy Moms comes out in a few weeks, at which point I'll post some images from inside to show how the front cover design was reflected within.

If you want to order this ebook, go to HomemadeMommy.net.

I need to go find some chocolate now.