Exercise: Book Cover design

For this exercise I have to create 3 book cover designs including the spines for 3 H G Wells books as part of a set. The designs must include the title, authors name, publishers name and trademark.
The Keywords for this brief are: stunning, contemporary, timeless, acclaimed author, relevant, fiction.
My first step in creating the brief is research. I will need to research different H G Wells books, their titles and what they are about I will then need to decide on a way to group these books to create a set. I will also look at previous designs for H G Wells book covers to get inspiration but to also make sure i create something different and i will look and how, if at all his books have been grouped before.
 Using the website www.goodreads.com i began looking at the different books H.G.Wells had written and read the brief description about what they were about so i could begin to group the authors books. I tried to group these books by themes running within the story lines.

 I then tried to look at books that had been grouped before and how they had been grouped as i did not want to do what had already been done a thousand times over. I narrowed by themes down to two possible ones i would use; utopia and aliens. I the made a mind map of the two and the books i could include focusing on keywords on what the books were about, and things that came to mind when thinking of those themes to try and get an idea of what i could include of the book cover designs.

 I decided the three books I'm going to use for my set will all include the theme of aliens somewhere within the story, and so the books i am using are: War of the worlds, First men in the moo and A modern utopia.

Using the keywords from the design brief, i made another mind map based on H.G.Wells and how i might incorporate such ideas into my designs.

Before i began to sketch rough ideas for my cover designs, i decided to look at book covers that already existed to get ideas, but to also make sure i was doing something different, and not too similar to what had been done before.

I then began to sketch rough ideas of my own based on the research i had already done.

I tried to keep my ideas quite simplistic to keep in with some of the keywords such as timeless, in the hope that my design will always remain relevant, and not 'out of style' but also in the hope the simplicity of my designs will give a sophisticated look suited for such an author.
I tried to make my designs intriguing and visually pleasing for all ages to hopefully attract his already existing audience as well as a new following.