After years of loving sci-fi and seeing amazing designs from other designers in this genre, I finally had a chance to try something in the style. I wanted to create a modern brutalist sci-fi design, focusing on the new primary character shown on the book’s cover, and I wanted it to reflect the futuristic yet D&D style fantasy of the novel.

The new star character for the book was a death knight or a sort of space necromancer and I wanted to highlight that. I utilized pieces of the book’s cover art as a basis, pulling out the character as well as some background elements that I knew would look great in the design. Skulls, crunchy digital textures and futuristic designs highlight the sci-fi fantasy genre of the book and the character nicely, and I re-enforced it with the character’s name in a bold contrasting blackletter font. Then I simplified the graphics into a 4 color design to give it a screen printed look and grunged up the design to make it look extra retro.

Once the design was completed I designed a number of exciting color combinations and we settled on 2 that played off the colors of the cover art.