# Cover Design Concepts

## Book Info
- **Title**: Understanding LLM Context Windows
- **Subtitle**: A Practical Guide for Software Engineers
- **Trim size**: 6×9 in (standard technical paperback)
- **Palette suggestion**: Dark background (#0d1117) with gold/amber accents (#ffd700) — technical, premium feel

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## Concept A: The Sliding Window

**Visual**: A horizontal scrolling window revealing a fragment of dense text or code. The visible portion is lit/sharp; outside the frame is dark and blurred. A token counter in the top-right ticks upward toward a red threshold line.

**Tone**: Precise, slightly ominous. Emphasizes what the model can and can't see.

**Image prompt (Midjourney / DALL-E)**:
> Dark technical book cover, a glowing rectangular viewport on a dark background revealing dense lines of text and code, the text outside the frame fades to darkness, amber token counter in the top-right corner approaching a red threshold line, minimalist, professional, no people, typographic space at top for title

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## Concept B: The Filing Cabinet

**Visual**: An abstract filing cabinet rendered in flat geometric style. The top drawer is open and lit; the bottom drawers are closed and dark. Inside the open drawer: small glowing document icons representing tokens. The metaphor of working memory vs. long-term storage.

**Tone**: Clean, approachable, metaphor-driven.

**Image prompt**:
> Flat geometric illustration of a filing cabinet on dark background, top drawer open with glowing document fragments inside representing tokens, lower drawers dark and closed, minimalist vector style, amber and dark gold color palette, book cover composition with space at top for title text

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## Concept C: The Budget Allocation

**Visual**: A horizontal bar divided into colored segments: system prompt, history, RAG context, user message, output buffer. Each segment labeled with token counts. Clean infographic aesthetic. One segment labeled "OVERFLOW" in red is partially outside the bar.

**Tone**: Engineering-focused, systematic. Appeals directly to the "token budgeting" chapter.

**Image prompt**:
> Dark background technical book cover, horizontal segmented bar chart showing token allocation slots in different amber/gold shades with labels, one red overflow segment extending past the boundary, clean sans-serif labels, infographic style, minimalist, professional book cover layout

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## Recommended Concept

**Concept A (The Sliding Window)** — most visually distinctive, directly represents the core concept, works well at thumbnail size (important for ebook marketplaces).
