You Are Thursday
Book Cover Illustration
CLIENT PROJECT | PRINT DESIGN, ILLUSTRATION, TYPOGRAPHY
Overview
You Are Thursday is a time travel crime thriller by author Chad Halcom, set against the glamour and danger of 1960s Las Vegas. Halcom came to me with an existing cover that wasn't landing the right tone. The goal was a ground-up redesign that communicated the genre and era immediately, while capturing something more specific: the feeling of a world that looks familiar but is slightly, unsettlingly wrong.
Previous Covers
The original covers had energy, but no clear point of view. The bold yellow palette pulled attention without directing it. Collaged elements, film strips, silhouettes, and clashing typefaces competed rather than collaborated. The genre was hard to read at a glance. There was no unified mood.
Cover #1
Cover #1 Redesign Attempt
Cover #2
Process
Research came first. Vintage Vegas signage, mid-century noir film posters, and pulp thriller cover conventions helped establish the visual language the design needed to speak. From there, I explored four distinct directions before committing.
Sketch 1 explored a surreal, abstracted approach with a silhouette of a singer framing a lone running figure.
Sketch 2 leaned into the time displacement concept, figures falling through a door surrounded by radar-like rings. S
Sketch 3 used a split composition: a noir detective above, and below, an inverted sultry lounge singer in a casino showroom with a shady high roller in the background.
Sketch 4 moved toward glamour and tension, a femme fatale and a shadowed figure in the foreground with the Playa Palma Hotel in the background.
Sketch 3 had the right bones. The split between the detective above and the inverted lounge scene below captured both moods the story needed at once: authority and unease, glamour and danger. The inversion wasn't disorientation for its own sake; it was a visual shorthand for the dual reality at the core of the story, a character split between two points in time.
The client responded to it immediately, and the final design grew from that direction.
Final Design
The cover uses a tripartite layout: a shadowed detective figure against the Playa Palma Hotel above, a neon marquee title treatment in the center, and an inverted lounge scene below. Deep teal and crimson create visual tension between the cool mystery of time displacement and the hot danger of Vegas crime. The typography draws from vintage neon marquee lettering, period-accurate and readable at thumbnail size. A swirling distortion effect runs through the full spread, serving as the visual metaphor for time itself being unstable.
The back cover grounds the reader in the Las Vegas strip before they read a word of the synopsis. The full spread holds together as a cohesive visual narrative, front to spine to back.
Reflection
A well-designed cover does not just represent a book. It interprets it. It makes an argument for why the story is worth your time.
This project reinforced that a strong cover is less about decoration and more about editorial judgment, knowing what to amplify, what to leave out, and what emotional promise to make before a single page is turned.
You Are Thursday by Chad Halcom
Publisher: Independently published
Category: Time Travel Fiction / Crime Thriller
Published: 2020