The Resting Places was a new collection of Warhammer Horror stories written by several Black Library authors including David Annandale and Richard Strachan. Warhammer Horror is an exclusive sub-genre offering within the Black Library publishing house. 

 

I was given the opportunity to do a full cover design for the collection that needed to be distinct but generic horror themed. All horror books in the Black Library offering have a red spot colour on the fore-edge and usually are designed in-house in a more graphical style.

 

Inspired by gothic, vampiric and dark magic themes, I wanted to play around with the titling to make the cover more typographical led rather than art-led. In the initial design stage, I was inspired to incorporate the typography into a spider’s web to give a creepy ‘stringy’ effect, giving the illusion that the title was suspended in mid-air. Once I developed this concept further and with feedback from the wider team, I took the vector base design into Adobe Photoshop and played around with shadows and brushes and digitally painted the webbing. The developed design resulted in two colour-ways which both were equally strong designs.  

 

The final result is a bold, typographical, gothic horror cover which really stands out on the shelf when placed alongside other books.