Stephen Payne

Stephen Payne is an author who commissioned Design Image to design the cover for his debut novel, and returned to us for the sequel, trusting us to bring the same level of care and creativity to both books.

Stephen Payne needed a cover for his debut novel, My Own Little Place: Adventures in the Quest to Find One’s Place in Life, that captured the spirit of the story and made an immediate impression on a potential reader.

The novel has everything going for it, adventure, mystery and romance set against a rich Celtic backdrop in Ireland. The cover needed to communicate all of that at a glance. We started with pencil and paper, sketching ideas by hand before taking the best concepts into our design systems and developing them into the finished cover. Hand-drawn illustration is one of the things we genuinely love and do well, and this project was a real opportunity to show that.

My Own Little Place II, book design

When Stephen Payne completed the sequel, My Own Little Place II: The Show Must Go On, he came back to us to design the second cover.

The brief was to create something compelling in its own right while maintaining a clear visual connection to the first book, so readers would immediately recognise it as part of the same series. We paid close attention to every detail throughout the process, producing front and rear cover designs that felt like a natural continuation while bringing something fresh to the series.