When indie publishing evangelist and best selling author J.A. Konrath got the rights back to the first six books of his Hyperion-published Jack Daniels series, he asked if we could give each of the volumes a unified design that could carry forward into new books featuring the seasoned, brash Chicago detective at the heart of his series.

In creating the design for Konrath, we considered the things that make the series iconic and at the core of that was the City of Chicago and its police department, often referred to as “Chicago’s Finest.” This became our starting point and we looked for elements that make the Chicago PD familiar to the city’s residents and recognizable to others from depictions in other forms of popular media.

The first element in this design is the checkerboard hatband of CPD uniformed officers. We underscored this element with a thin blue stripe using the exact light blue that’s used throughout the organization, from uniform shirts to the stripes on the department’s flag and squad cars. To round out the look, we used the department’s font—or a very close match—and set it with the exact red that marks the prowlers with CHICAGO POLICE.

Author: J.A. Konrath
Titles: WHISKEY SOUR, BLOODY MARY, RUSTY NAIL, DIRTY MARTINI, FUZZY NAVEL, CHERRY BOMB
Deliverables: Premium Kindle and ePub ebooks, print interior design for Publish-On-Demand
Features: Embedded font, custom made chapter headings using scalable images, dropcaps