This was the first ebook in a series. Along with creating the ebook itself, I knew my work would become a template for the rest of the series. I spent a lot of time developing the concept before I made any significant progress on the layout of content.

I wanted the template to have a signature cover, one that would make each addition to the series easily identifiable. However, inside the cover I wanted lots of flexibility. I also wanted the cover to appeal to my audience: public, academic, and special librarians. Therefore, I decided to lean upon every librarian’s love for beautiful, leather-bound books, and use a faux peek-hole in the cover to visually separate one book in the series from the next. This created a sort of dual-branding opportunity… the series having one brand, while each individual installment is allowed unique color schemes and symbols.

Once I established the concept for the series, I fleshed out the concept for this first installment. Web Services is not the most visually inspiring topic. There is a sort of design anthology connecting web services to images of clouds, but I didn’t want to lean too heavily upon that. So, I settled on a line-and-node figure as the basic motif, symbolizing how web services connects information across different databases in the internet ether. I combined this symbol with a sunrise illustration for the title-image. I feel this combination was visually interesting, hopeful, and calming (we didn’t want anybody running away because it looked to technical), while also tipping a hat to the “cloud” anthology.

I created the illustrations in Illustrator, but the interactive PDF was made in InDesign.