book cover art - artistic and designy

I've written a book with my professor and will be publishing it on IngramSpark so it can be ordered in the future - though I very much doubt it will be.  The book is mostly just a time capsule which will be preserved alongside the vials of desiccated microbes that are part of a 500-year experiment.

The book is going to be published in 8.5 x 11 format, and I need you to please make me the art for the cover.  (I am not sure if this includes inside the front cover or not - but I assume not...)

The book is about 175 pages long. Besides the opening pages (copyright, dedication, table of contents, etc), it has 4 parts: 
Introduction (about 6 pages)
Photographic time capsule of life in 2024 (about 84 pages of mostly full color pictures with some captions)
Interviews with current students and professors (about 70 pages of mostly text with just one picture of each person being interviewed)
Acknowledgments

I was thinking that I'd like to use the attached photo of Charles's microbes (this is an actual picture from his laboratory) but in the middle circle, I was thinking maybe to put in a map of Edinburgh? But I'm not just looking for simply photoshoping the map into the circle... I want the cover to have personality.

BTW I have many, many more variations on this picture - and I can always go take more if you need a different layout - but here's one to give you an idea.  

On the back, I wanted to include a picture of me and Charles holding the box of microbes - those are the actual microbes in the experiment!  I'm not in love with this specific picture, so it's just a placeholder for now.

Here's the "Full Description" that I have included in my IngramSpark account:

In 2014, scientists at the University of Edinburgh began a 500-year experiment: sealing microbes in glass vials, half shielded by lead, to test how long life can survive in desiccated form under cosmic and terrestrial radiation. 400 duplicate vials are stored at the University of Edinburgh—and in the Natural History Museum, London—as living legacies for future generations.

But what will become of the human context around this experiment? This book documents the society, spaces, and voices of science in 2025: a time capsule of a living campus, its people, its routines, and its values.

In 2024, at the ten-year time point of the microbial experiment, Astrophysics student Holley Conte conducted interviews with 18 students, faculty, and staff across the science campus, and captured a sweeping photographic record of lab life, common rooms, offices, and everyday moments. These interviews and images will themselves be archived alongside the microbes, with a copy of this volume to be kept alongside the vials in the University of Edinburgh and at the Natural History Museum in London.

This book weaves together three ideas:
the scientific backbone of the 500-year experiment — its rationale, methods, constraints, and long-term challenges of continuity and legacy;
the human narrative of working and learning in 2025 — voices, settings, aspirations, and the texture of daily life;
reflections on legacy, memory, and continuity — how future generations might interpret or extend this project, and how scientists can plan beyond the limits of a human lifetime.

A memorable line from The Atlantic sums up the experiment’s spirit: “science—or some version of it—still exists in 2514.” That hopeful gamble underpins both this microbial project and its social companion: the hope that people centuries hence will not only reopen vials, but hear our voices, see our faces, and understand our world.

This book is written for curious readers, science enthusiasts, historians, and anyone interested in how human lives intersect with long-term science. No advanced microbiology background required — just openness to thinking in centuries and living in moments.
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