Welcome to the Cross-Product Creative Challenge. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Galactic Wildlife challenge. This one will demand a little more!
The Challenge:
Design the cover for a mystery novel, one that will stand out in a bookstore display. It can be noir, cozy, psychological, procedural, or 1930s pulp fiction. The exact genre is up to you.
Guidelines:
- A prompt is not enough. Layer your assets and refine your composition. Treat Firefly as a collaborator, not a shortcut.
- Make it real. Include a title and author name, but no taglines or blurbs.
- It’s a Cross-Product Challenge! Use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Substance, Express—whatever tools help you build a compelling cover.
- Process matters. Include a brief description of how you created it. What tools did you use? How did you refine your idea? What choices did you make? This is how we share ideas and techniques.
This example uses Firefly, FLUX.1 Kontext, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Stock (the thumbprint), and of course InDesign.
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Having Firefly render a night train compartment (don't ask, it just doesn't know anything about trains, just as if the Orient Express never existed). And then having it render a dagger. Combining that in Photoshop and then autotracing the thing in Illustrator to get a cheap look like a 1960ies detective novel. Borrowing the typography from 1960ies western genre novel though 😄
Given that I'm currently working on a game dev project and also reading a book about the history of Nintendo (entitled Super Mario by Jeff Ryan), I was inspired to take this challenge in a slighly different direction. Thus, my book cover is for: The Maltese Monkey which gives nods to The Maltese Falcon (a 1930 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett) and the beloved classic Mario franchises (Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo). In this story, Mario takes up the role as Sam Spade, Private Eye. He seeks to locate the missing statue of Donkey Kong and the culprits who stole it. His only clues are a smashed glass case that held the artifact and a note left at the crime scene with the words "The cake is a lie" scrawled on it.
For my initial design, I used Nano Banana and Photoshop to mock up my ideas. I eventually settled on the layout shown above. For the final scene I used various images and models (Firefly, Flux, Nano Banana) to generate elements of the scene which were composited in Photoshop. Final tweaks and color adjustments were made with Adobe Camera Raw. The Maltese Monkey logo was fleshed out in Photoshop and then brought to Illustrator where it was traced to create clean vector art. The elements were pulled together and the final cover design was created with Adobe Illustrator. 
I found this used book while cleaning out the attic... It's one of the best mystery books I've ever received for Christmas. After that, I never saw Christmas the same way again.
Workflow:
Scene and christmas ornament made with Firefly.
Everything has been pushed inside Photoshop for compositing work and to get the final background image.
Color Grading with camera Raw. Then, back to Photoshop for Title addition and Texturization
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