All Guilty of Gallantry
Book Cover Design - Col. Jerry L. Creed, USMC


I love books! They are windows into other worlds and a means to exercise the creative mind. I am rarely without a book; typically picking up a new one immediately after finishing another.
I favor physical books over digital ones. Something is amazing about holding the book and seeing the cover art. Due to this, I am actively seeking more opportunities to work on book covers professionally. I enjoy the challenge of trying to sum up an entire story into one design that captures the attention of potential readers.
In 2011, my father passed away, leaving me three unpublished novels that no one knew he had written. These novels are a trilogy series based on the true-life events of my dad's life within the military. These books are some of my most prized possessions as they are a window into a side of my father I rarely got to see and a reminder of the great man that he was. He gifted these stories to me under the request that I get them published and do the cover art. I was beyond touched by this request.All Guilty of Gallantry is the first in the series. It focuses on a young man being deployed to Vietnam at the peak of the war. Unlike most war stories, it does not focus on the way itself, but instead of the soldiers within the war, choosing not to glorify them, but instead emphasize that they were young men, many of whom were terrified and homesick. To focus on this unique angle of the story, I decided to use a traditional military color palette, but uniquely. I used softer browns/greens and included a lot of white space. The goal is the unique colors would help the book stand out from other similar stories that may be sitting on the shelf next to it.
Additionally, I'm showing a lone soldier walking through the jungle to reflect that the story is one man's lonely account of a scary situation that stayed with him through the rest of his life.