Graphic designer required for global public-service work (aka no budget freebie)

I recently released the eBook of Fraudcast News and am now in the final stages of preparing the paperback. Both are under a Creative Commons 2.5 licence, share-alike with attribution for non-commercial uses (I’m also offering the ebook/pdf free to people if they promise to punt them around a bit).

I need a cover design for the paperback before I can put it out there – which is where you, or someone you know, (might) come in. As for all things Fraudcast News, I have no budget. If you’re still reading, this is what we’re talking about:

Me – a budget-free, self-publishing author seeking a stop-them-in-their-tracks cover design for a book that shows up the bogusness of our democracies and the poor journalism that keeps them in place.

You – an impossibly talented graphic designer of such sought-after brilliance that finding time for this irresistible brief will require you to make career-threatening work choices to get this done now.

If you’re still reading, this is the book blurb:

People like to quote Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government bar all the others. Yet who’s the butt of this decades-old joke if it’s not us?

Why do we accept democracy as an occasional choice between identikit candidates? We know our votes change little, leaving power with a wealthy elite that acts via corporations and global financial markets.

Fraudcast News unpicks this political charade – and the media complicity that masks it – in Britain, the EU, the United States and globally. It shows how reporters, far from being relentless critics of the status quo, are just as beholden to big money as our governors.

Yet this is a hopeful story, told as the confessions of an ex-Reuters journalist. It shows how we can have influence by training up local reporters who focus on accountability and governance where they live. It imagines joining them up into a global reporting network for a worldwide citizenry.

If you care about journalism, or dream of it as a career, if you believe “democracy” should mean “we, the people”, this book’s for you.

If you’re still, still reading, what I have in mind graphically is something clear, clean and simple that conveys the sense of bad journalism and bogus democracy. The thumbprint below is the best I could do from the off-the-shelf images for Lulu’s eBooks.

I have scavenged a few images from fotolia and elsewhere, attached below, for ideas. If all else fails, it will be time for me to get going with the Teach-yourself-Photoshop tutorials.

The sooner I can nail the cover the better, it’s time to get this book out there and to get on with its aftermath.

I like the clean lines and simplicity of the Corporation’s image (the documentary’s pretty excellent too):

Something from all or some of the following could work:

Perhaps into some sort of “We the people + mass hands on LHS and $ on the RHS:

In addition to we the people versus $$$, I am being impossibly ambitious and probably graphically over complex in also wanting to include something to show the sorry state of our journalism. I can’t resist it though, with these images being ones that strike me:

The first couple of scenes from this image:

Perhaps “Democracy?” in the speech bubble

Finally, if we ever get that far, I was toying with something for the title Fraudcast News in this sort of a treatment:

Or equally, the magnifying glass looking at the word “democracy” and showing up “oligarchy” on closer inspection.

These are just ideas, none of them cast in stone.