In just over one month’s time on September 1st 2023, my latest book of poems will be released. The book, titled ORBIT, will be my 11th book of original poems and has taken four years of work to realize.

As well as writing the poems in the book, I turned my hand at the cover design of this one. I wanted to make it both minimalistic and vast at the same time. I hope you like it.

I kept thinking about those first astronauts that ventured to space and looked back at our beautiful blue planet and could cover the entirety of life as we know it with one thumb. That, and at the fact that the Earth being round helped replace the O in the word Orbit was handy when it came to the design esthetics.

It wasn’t the original idea for the cover, that was an entirely different concept. The idea was to have a painted hand print, my hand print on the cover. It was going to be painted blue, green, and brown to mimic the colors of the Earth on the front, and gray, white, and black to mimic the moon on the back cover. It would have been a cool cover I think, but in the end I decided to go in an entirely different direction whilst still keeping the original idea of the Earth on the front and the moon on the back.

So, there you have it. The front and back covers of my new book Orbit, set to be released in Hardback, Paperback, and ebook on September 1, 2023. Let me know what you think of it. I will leave you with the title poem from the book.

ORBIT by Phillip Mellor