BOOK DESIGN COVER FOR MMA BOOK APPROVED

I love MMA and have always wanted to design something in this field, when the opportunity came to bid for the design of a MMA Conditioning book I quickly threw open Photoshop & Illustrator and threw a few design together.

The brief was for the book cover to be a mixture between a vintage boxing style poster and the more modern UFC style poster designs with also an element of the simplicity of the original Rocky style posters from the late 70s and early 80s.

For the 1st design I made a textured background with jagged edges, dirt, and a subtle cage wire with a red gradient overlay


The client liked the ideas behind this but not the tribal elements and also wanted the images to be more conditioning based and less of the fighting elements. I had a rethink and went back to researching vintage boxing posters and also the original Rocky posters. I liked the roughness of the old boxing posters and obviously the roughness came from age, wear & teat but deiced I would try that effect, and also convert some images to vectors in Illustrator using the trace feature. I also changed the main text to be more like the vintage posters using similar layouts, fonts & stars.


Now the client loved this design and this got me the job, the client had some time to think about the next steps and decided to simplify the design by having a solid white background, we experimented with some images the client had on file, I also experimented with some photoshop lighting effects on the main text


After this the client wanted to stick with one focal image and for it to also be a plain silhouette, we changed some of the text and now the final version is ready to go to the printers and to hit all good bookshops in America and beyond. More of our work can be viewed at www.massappealdesigns.com