Melbourne proved to be a trickier City to depict in an abstract way than I had anticipated! As I researched I felt like the City had two sides one, the beach/sea loving contingent the other a food/cafe urban loving culture.

I first looked into the more urban culture of cafe’s and food halls and discovered the Queen Victoria Market as a hub of produce (see website below):

http://www.qvm.com.au/about/

I also discovered a trend for being obsessive about Coffee. I started looking at images of these shops and stores:

Market lane Coffee shop

Common Galaxia Coffee Shop

Common Galaxia Coffee Shop – take two

You can see a real colour theme here of pale colours against rich dark colours. So pale green and grey against a black or a gold. My thought was to create a cover that made use of these colours and used industrial lines. Here’s how that turned out:

Cover design attempt one

To me it felt a little lifeless and stiff and I couldn’t see that as a fair representation of Melbourne so I started to look into the sea/beach life of the city instead.

My start point was the popular aquarium:

http://www.melbourneaquarium.com.au/explore/coral-atoll/

Aquarium pt.1

Aquarium – pt.2

I really love the vibrancy of the aquarium and found that same vibrancy reflected as I looked at popular beach town St. Kilda…

St. Kilda – beach huts

St. Kilda – Pier

St. Kilda – tram

City Circle line tram

In the end I drew on the blues and purples of the aquarium as a basis for my cover design and I think the result gives a better picture of Melbourne:

Final cover image