I designed the cover of Smashing Magazine’s “Successful Freelancing for Web Designers” ebook.

Lately I’ve been working for Smashing Magazine on a number of illustration-oriented projects. I’m loving this opportunity as it gives me exposure and the chance to expand into full-blown illustration.
One of the projects I’m involved with is the ongoing series “Smashing Ebooks”.
After designing the cover for ebook #1 I was asked to design an illustration for ebook #2, entitled “Successful Freelancing for Web Designers”. Here’s my design:

Designing covers for books with such broad contents is difficult as there’s no single idea to go for. After thinking it over I decided to concentrate on the concept of the freelancer as a professional who juggles many responsibilities and duties. Here’s the sketch I sent to Vitaly for approval:

They liked the concept but I feared it wouldn’t blend with the other covers. This was going to be a painted, organic illustration whereas the series features geometric landscapes with flat shading. So I decided to simplify the illustration while retaining the overall idea and proceeded to change my sketch into a geometric, stylized illustration.

I’m pretty happy with the result, considering I had pictured a totally different outcome.
I learned a valuable lesson here and feel more confident of my flexibility as an illustrator.
I also experimented with a shading style that’s completely vector and hence resolution-indipendent. This allowed me to play around with the shapes, their proportions and relative placement quite a bit—a highly flexible workflow made possible by the combination of Photoshop’s layer styles applied to shape layers.

I hope you like the design as much as I do and I urge you to check out the ebook.