Grim Repast was a new Warhammer Crime novel written by Marc Collins, featuring the main character Quillion Drask. Warhammer Crime is an exclusive sub-genre offering within the Black Library publishing house.  

 

Warhammer Crime books follow different branding design guidelines compared to the branding guidelines set out for the books in the standard range. With this in mind, the typography sits front and center of the cover and plays a prominent role in grabbing the reader’s attention. Through R&D, I wanted to go for a ‘sliced’ typography style to subtly imply the murderous grueling themes of the story without it being too obvious. I started by using Adobe Illustrator to create the typography vectors and composition, and then I developed the typography in Adobe Photoshop using a range of brushes and effects to get the subtle bloody look.

 

 

The landscape for the book is very dark, grungy but with a cold snowy theme. I designed two contrasting grunge snow textures in Adobe Photoshop as well as using another softer texture within the typography. Continuing the sliced theme on the back cover I broke outside of the grid in Adobe InDesign and worked with angles to right align the text and create the shards to feature the main character. The result is a bold, modern yet subtly strong book cover that compliments the art and story giving a bloody, haunting ominous vibe.