History book covers

I want to keep the book covers in theme with the current bitesize look, but i want to give it a new interesting them, keeping in with my aim to make learning more interesting and inspiring. I have looked at current bitesize revision guides and they are so boring and serious, there is nothing that would grab my attention and feel i would even want to open the book up. I am therefore going to only use a few elements of current bitesize material to inspire my book covers and still help them look like they belong to bitesize.

An orange bar running along the top and bottom of the page is similar to current designs, however i have change this to fit in with my designs to a collaged orange strip instead of a solid orange colour. I have also changed the bitesize logo to the collaged one i created earlier, i think these are both positive changes to the cover. I feel the large type instructing you of the content of the book works really well with the layout of page. There is perhaps too much orange involved in these designs for them to look individual so i shall look at developing that.

The above cover works quite nice with change of colour to the title history, the blue pulls the words out of the page, instead of sinking into the orange blocks. The image doesn't work as strong as earlier images as it probably isn't obvious to a child what it is, until they have learnt about it. Looking at the cover by itself and the above of the ration book, the image just floats on the page, it doesn't really make sense, where as the first with the airplane is more of an illustration, a story by simply adding the sky to the background it fills up more space. The two above have two much white space surrounding them. I need to look at filling this up with further development.

A gas mask is such a well known object from the war, i though this would feature really well on the book cover, i have tried to add something into the background so it doesn't look like its floating as much as the two above, but this hasn't worked with any of the colours. I think feed back from a crit would really benefit these covers.

The collage circle in the background works much better than the two solid colours above, however i am still not convinced this layout of illustration works successfully.