Project 4: Shape & Color
About the project
In this project, we are designing three book covers for books that are part of a series. I picked a trilogy that is Maxim Gorky’s autobiography, My Childhood, In The World and My University. The Autobiography talks about when the character grows up from a 5-year-old child to a teenager and to a middle-aged man, how things happened around him have changed his perspective of the world.
I want to capture the idea of a person’s growth, as I think that is the major theme of this trilogy. Thus, I drew eyes of a child, a teenager and an old man to show ageing throughout the time, which is also the main element that is shared throughout the book cover series.
Project Process
In the first class, we practiced sketching in class and I have attached my in-class work below. From this exercise, I realized that I do not need really good drawing skills in order to deliver my ideas, as simple and effective illustrations are also widely welcomed in design.
Thus, I decided to try out sketching different themes for my trilogy.
First of all, when I thought about personal development, or growth, I thought about using a growth of a tree to represent the growth of the main character of my books. However, I realized this idea is pretty obvious, a bit too straightforward and not interesting, so I moved on to another design idea.
The second design idea is driven by minimalism. As this trilogy is really old, I want to give it a brand new and opposite perspective of modernness. However, this idea might be a little bit too simplistic and requires a lot of design in picking a good typeface. Nevertheless, the covers are all too similar, resulting in each cover not telling a different story.
After rethinking about what the books are really about, I thought about showing part of a face that would demonstrate the passing of time. The first thing I came up with was wrinkles. However, it is hard to demonstrate wrinkles directly, I thus used eyes instead. It turned out to be a different and interesting idea and is also applied in my final version.
First Digital Iteration
My first digital iteration mainly turned my sketches to AI files. At the beginning, I did not want to use too much colors just for the sake of minimalism and simplicity.
Second Digital Iteration
On the second digital iteration, I decided to try out colors. As it is hard to come up with what three colors to use for three books, I wanted to put all the colors on the canvas and see which one would fit. This experiment led me to a result as follows:
I found that the rainbow colors are powerful, comfortable and beautiful to use for book covers directly. Thus, even though I started out with trying to pick colors by listing out all colors, I ended up with using all of them.
I also used this version and the first digital iteration with eyes as the mid crit versions. I received a lot of useful and insightful comments, such as “the rainbow colors are pretty but not sure what the relationship between them and the books”, “the eyes deliver the idea of aging really well”, and “the book covers with eyes are too simple, maybe you could try to combine the colors and eyes.” With those comments in mind, I went on design the third digital iteration with both the elements of colors and eyes.
Third Digital Iteration
From the comments I received during the mid crit, I tried many different combinations of rainbow colors and eyes, so that the background of the eyes versions are not too empty.
I tried to put the eyes in black on the rainbow background. Seeing them being too dark, I tried put the eyes in white on the rainbow background, and rearranged where the titles are. However, when turned the colors to white, I suddenly didn’t have the feeling of eyes staring at you anymore. As I think it is important to have the book covers talking to readers, I decided to have a white layer underneath a dark colored layers. The outcome was really satisfying, as I both see eyes talking to readers, also two layers made them more realistic and three dimensional.
However, I think these rainbow colors, although beautiful, do not deliver contents of the books either. Sometimes, I also think it is too much to put almost 7 colors in 3 book covers. Thus, I decided to apply the same idea for the eyes, but simplify the background colors.
Forth Digital Iteration
During the weekend, I went to New York for an interview and had extra time to spend in MOMA. In MOMA, I saw a large painting that I immediately fell in love with and thought I might be able to apply the same idea on my book covers. The painting is called Vir Heroicus Sublimis by Barnett Newman.
Now the question is what colors exactly should I use for back ground colors.
I chose red for My Childhood because there is a saying of newly born babies, or kids are like sun rise, and red immediately pictures that.
I chose blue for In The World because when the character in the book being a teenager, he is forced to go out, find jobs and work consistently for a living. He is depressed and has no way of changing his life state. He sees blue.
Finally, for My University, I chose green because the character later goes into a mountain for a university, although fails graduating from that university and is forced to go to the society and learn about life from people instead, he learns that the world is his university. I think green represents his original hope for knowledge and the mountain where the real university is.
In this iteration, I also changed the typeface as my peer commented my previous versions’ typeface is too basic. I found this one amusing. It is a human written liked typeface that keeps me thinking about “this must be a story” while at the same time not too exaggerate.
Final Digital Iteration
Before the final crit, I decided to redesign everything for several reasons.
First of all, I showed my previous design to my high school best friend, who currently studies design in Rhode Island School of Design. She said she could not tell any stories from the book covers, the eyes deliver some ideas and concepts from the book but are not strong enough, and as these book covers are so general, they could be applied to any books, which in general is not a good design.
Secondly, I don’t like the colors I picked and I know I am not good at picking colors. The three colors I picked for the previous version are old fashioned and we do not usually see books with those three basic colors.
Thus, I decided to not only redesign the covers but also use black, grey and white as my theme colors. I tried to leave the eyes on the book cover, and use symbolism for the world he sees through his eyes.
At the same time, my friend suggested me to come up with a single word to describe the book and then design the covers toward the feeling of that word.
For My Childhood, the word I came up with is “lively”, because the character, as a child, is happy and lives a worry-free life. Thus, I use bubbles to picture his carefree life style and how he thinks the world is full of surprises.
Each bubble represents a different person with different background, taste, idea, daily routine while also interacts with each other. The character as a child sees all of them through his eyes and finds the world a interesting place.
For In The World, the word I came up with is “disciplined”. As the character goes into the real world, he found that there are so many rules in the society that he has never encountered before.
I used the straight lines in grey to represent rules and restrictions in the world and had his eyes in between those rules and in a rather small and congested area to show how he feels breathless in the world that he is not ready for.
I order the “rules”, or lines locally but not globally, because I think the world has orders while so many orders are also interleaved with each other. Thus, I did not put just plain straight lines as patterns in the background as I think that kind of order also does not represent the world.
For My University, the word I thought about is “inclusive”. As he grows older, he decides to go into a mountain for higher education. However, forced to get out of school, he goes back to the society and sees the whole society as his university.
The background is formed with different heights of mountains, shadowing where he is going originally for his university. However, this is not enough because he did not just go to school, get a degree and reach end of the story. He is forced to get out of the school, and realized the whole world is his university to learn from. Thus, I used different patterns for each layer of the mountains to show how the world university is inclusive and does not reject anyone to wants to learn more. In this book, he finally relaxed and he sees the world university from his own eyes.
