Image Editing

I chose to design a book cover for Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond because of my passion for public health. The background is a stock image from Pixabay, licensed free for commercial use. I chose the map background to emphasize the global health focus of the book. The original image was a 3508 x 2480 pixel jpg, which was resized, cropped, and rotated using the "cover creator" tools on Bookbrush.com to the 1600 x 2560 cover size used for Kindle ebooks. Each of the three black emblems on the cover (gun reticle, virus outline, and gear outline, all also from Pixabay via Bookbrush) are stock vector images individually selected, resized, and positioned using BookBrush cover creator tools. Each image was selected as a visual reference to the title. Text was added for the title using individual text edits for each word, allowing for adjustment in position and size. The font "Jim Nightshade" was chosen to match the historic feel of the map background and invoke the historic scale of time covered in the book. The font "Almendra SC" was chosen for the byline and author's name to set it apart from the title while maintaining the overall historical tone. White text was chosen for good contrast to improve readability. After editing, the final image was rendered as a jpeg using BookBrush's online tools and downloaded.

Dr. Azure Ocean is my marine animal medicine personal brand name. I downloaded Inkscape to complete this assignment. I had never used it before. I watched a few YouTube tutorials and read through the software’s tutorials. I did not find Inkscape to be a user-friendly program for beginners. I designed this logo to use a lot of blue, since “azure” means blue and the ocean is blue. I used the palate to select a bold blue color and used the circle shape to create a circle a size that looked big enough to draw my design in. I created a sea turtle to represent marine life. I used the ellipse shape in aqua blue to draw the body, head, and a flipper. I duplicated that flipper to create a total of 4 flippers, then dragged and tilted them to place them on the body. I made text boxes for the “Dr. Azure Ocean” script in navy blue and the “V” on the turtle’s back to stand for “veterinary medicine.” I used the stroke setting to outline the “V” in black for better contrast against the lighter aqua blue of the turtle. I chose “Calibri” font for its clarity. I increased the font spacing to make the lettering more clear. I used the freehand pencil in black to draw a stick and the snake to make the caduceus medical symbol. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to change the line thickness (“Max”) because the default thickness was huge and I had to decrease it to 10 to look right compared to the line for the staff. Finally, I adjusted the “V” to be in the top layer of the image. This reminded me of adjusting the “z-layer” focus on the Leica digital microscope when I imaged my histology slides during my PhD, so that was a welcome bit of familiarity in this new adventure in graphic design.