The Honors College at Azusa Pacific University prints 6 books a year with student authors, illustrators and designers. I was hired as the Editorial Designer for the book titled, "The Other Side of Silence: Sympathy and Social Convention in George Elliot's Middlemarch."
Not only did I design the Front and Back cover, I was the interior designer as well.
One of my school projects was to design potential covers of the Oxbridge Books using only typographic forms.
Note the featured characters, Dante and JRR Tolkien, are created with letters and glyphs within different typefaces to create the feel of how the characters were represented within each book.
To unpack one books inspiration: The book, Shaped by Better Words, was inspired by the seven levels of hell content and the desire for readers own transformation within the text itself. I played with a gradient of red and a kind of swirling into the depths of hell in the middle with a pop of white representing both the hottest part of hell and the Holy Spirit and the transformation.