Project 4

This project will be inspired by 3 characters in the Harry Potter books, which I hold very dearly to my heart because the series was a big part of my childhood. The biggest thing that I enjoyed about the series as a child, and even now, as a matter of fact, is the depth of story and character that JK Rowling entangled into the plot of the series. It made it much easier for me as a child to relate to the characters and connect with them on a deeper level.

For that reason, I decided to do three book covers, not of the books themselves, but covering the depth of three very important, but not necessarily treated as such, characters of the series — RJ Lupin, a werewolf, Fawkes, a phoenix, and Dobby, a house elf. The idea is to introduce the depth of the characters with the art on the covers. I would have the title just be the names of the characters, the author be JK Rowling, and the additional text would be quotes by or about the character.

As I was initially searching around for different and unique book series covers, I came across these four Star Wars posters, and really liked the idea of the gradient and the silhouettes. I wanted to utilize gradients to highlight the silhouettes of the three Harry Potter characters, as well as use simplicity to emphasize the complexity and depth of their stories as well.

Iteration 1

For my first iteration of the project, I tried to draw out details of Dobby, which happened to be the first character I started to work on. The reason behind this was that the silhouette seemed to be too simple to me, so adding details would have potentially taken care of that problem. Displayed below, it’s very obvious that this did not go to plan at all, which is why I decided to move on to the second iteration of the book covers.

Iteration 2

For the next iteration, I started to create the silhouettes of just black and had the gradients in the background. I added a moon for Lupin, since it’s so critical for his character, which is a werewolf. I also started to add details to the spine and back. I wanted to highlight one of the various main themes of the books, which is the deathly hallows, represented by the symbol of a circle and line within a triangle. I also put the Hogwarts castle on the back cover along with a quote pertaining to each of the three respective characters. On the spine, I included a smaller version of the deathly hallows symbol, along with a “JKR” on the bottom for JK Rowling, and the name of the book, just the character name, but written in the iconic Harry Potter font. Since there wasn’t a font I could just download for that, I individually traced the letters. For all the other text, I used Garamond in different weights because Garamond is the official font of all the Harry Potter books.

Iteration 3

For the third iteration, I wanted to keep the spine and back cover constant but try to utilize the gradients and silhouettes in different ways, shown below. One variation was changing the black silhouettes to white. Another variation was putting the gradients within the silhouettes and playing with the backgrounds of those as well.

Desk Crit

During the informal desk crit, I was under the impression that I would have to choose one of the three variations in Iteration 3, but I was told that I can make my own rules and choose my favorites of all the variations. I also realized more and more that I really didn’t like the figure of Dobby, since it looked really boxy.

Walking away from the desk crit, I knew I wanted to modify my color choice, change Dobby’s figure, and choose three of the many variations I had made.

Interim Crit

Below are the book covers I chose for the desk crit. I had modified the colors and also come up with a detailed silhouette of Dobby. I had some questions for it going in— color choice, cohesion of the three book covers as one series, and lack of text on the front.

Overall, the feedback that I got was to choose one of the three versions of silhouettes to make it more cohesive of a book series, and maybe incorporate a small amount of text on the front. Another suggestion was to eliminate one of the two deathly hallows symbols.

Final Crit

After all the iterations, I am really happy with the results. I think they depict my message really well and effectively, and are also simplistic at the same time.