Tag Archives: Book cover design

Assignment Five: Your Choice – Part Three

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Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design anew house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

Thubmail sketches for a book design

Sketch 4

I started by developing the book covers based on the initial sketches (sketch 4).

As there was additional pages design involved in the Typography book I researched the main Pop Art characteristics:

  • Repetition
  • Recognizable imagery
  • Bright colours
  • Flat imagery
  • Celebrity/advertising images
  • Hard edges
  • Mundane reality and irony
  • Influence by comic books, newspapers and photographs
  • Consumerism and mass consumption
  • Blocks of colour

From this I developed a range of symbols in Illustrator as well as sketching a basic layout.  The biggest challenge seemed to be the wording and content, more so than the layout itself! It took me a while to decide what I would include in the first few pages. In the end I went for some background to typography and what I hoped would be some attractive exercises. I was a bit concerned that I had used a pop art approach in a previous assignment but I felt like my skills had moved on since then and I could be much bolder than I had been, I hoped that it would show my development.

I was still a little concerned that the book title is ‘A is for…’, which suggests a younger age group and an alphabet type book. I decided to overcome it by not making an obvious link and using A as the starting point for a voyage into typography, rather than a direct link to the words. I still wonder if young adults might be put off but hopefully the pop/graphic novel style would be attractive enough.

The design of the pages went through four main iterations as it developed:

I was looking for the beginnings of a book that was dynamic and interesting. I have used typography, colour, and layout (in other words pulling together all the elements of GD1) to try and achieve it. It took a little while for my ideas to surface but once they had I could see the direction I wanted to take. I printed each version as I went as I found it helped me identify issues I had missed on screen, like the stroke around the text box on page two, version two.

Pop art cover for a book on typography

Final cover design

I think the final version has a good degree of consistency even though I have tried to mix the format up throughout the pages. I am pleased with the result, not so much from the design point of view but because I can really see how my worked has evolved throughout the course and how my confidence has built.

Rework

Following feedback from tutor, which suggested in the politest possible way I had fallen into a common novice trap I did some rework on the covers. He highlighted that my chosen design appeared to have been designed as if the front and back covers would be seen at the same time and that they needed to be more distinct yet still being connected. I have therefore taken elements of front and back and worked them up further.

 

 

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Assignment Five: Your Choice – Part Two

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Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design a new house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

As I started sketching I was thinking a lot about what might encourage people to pick the book up. I thought it needed to be able to attract adults and young people as adults may be buying it for their children. I’m not quite sure where it came from but I remembered something from a workshop I did a while ago which highlighted how we are hard wired to be able to identify faces and that the eyes are an important element of that. I also came across Joel Meyerwitz’s book ‘Seeing Things’ on talking to kids about photography and the eye became a theme for me. I thought it might work because I could replace the pupil with symbols for each of the books in the series. I played with several versions and mocked up the cover for the colour book.

 

 

I was not as excited about them by the time I had finished as I hoped so I went back to my other sketches. I had decided that the books would be produced as the ‘Penguin Young Designers’ series and thought it might work to have the covers themed under a different era in graphic design (sketch 4). I then chose to look at Pop Art, minimalism, chaotic design, Dadaism, Surrealism and Grunge. I went back through my Pinterest boards and did some more research, and decided I would work up grunge (colour), Dadaism (Photographs) and Pop Art (Typography).

Thubmail sketches for a book design

Sketch 4

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Exercise: Book cover design

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Exercise (p.40 OCA Graphic Design): Your brief is to design a stunning and contemporary cover for one of the 20th Century’s most acclaimed authors, HG Wells. When you have a range of ideas and have notes in your learning log, make some rough drawings or sketches to show your ideas.

I could sense a little hesitation when I first read through the brief, this sounds like ‘proper’ graphic design! Rather than worry about whether I could come up with an appropriate design I thought about the research process. I started with an overarching mindmap drawing out some keywords, identifying research needs, thinking about different angles on the brief and drawing out some of the decision process. This process helped me think about which books I might design the book cover for, secondary online research showed that the most common titles for this sort of exercise seem to be ‘War of the Worlds,’ ‘The Invisible Man,’ ‘The Time Machine,’ and the ‘Island of Dr.Moreau.’

When I looked at HG Wells’ bibliography I came across a number of short stories that I hadn’t read before and decided this was the direction I wanted to take, that way I could perhaps develop something more distinctive. The short stories are full of rich symbolism with a glorious sense of the Gothic; several of them reminded me of Grand Guignol plays. I then decided on the three short stories I wanted to work with and did a further mindmap drawing out keywords for each of the titles. As I did this I had a sense I was starting to visualise how the design might develop, I could see some layouts in my mind’s eye.

In parallel I looked at lots of other examples for inspiration and tried to analyse the designs in terms of what I felt worked and what I might have done differently. I am now deep into playing with typefaces and thinking about which designs I might develop.

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