In Project 4, we create a series of book covers, focusing on the concepts of shape and color.
Initial Inspiration and Research
For this project, I decided on the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. They were an integral part of my childhood, and I really enjoyed learning about the fictional world where Greek gods can interact with mortals and demigods. It makes this distant aspect of ancient Greek history a little more relatable to modern-day. The following is information about the series:
Series: Percy Jackson series
Author: Rick Riordan
Genre: Fantasy Fiction
The book covers have been redesigned more than once, including a version that features the actors from the movie adaptation. However, my personal collection of the Percy Jackson series was the original hardcover version, and I actually do not enjoy the movie adaptation very much. Besides, the older covers are less photographic and more illustrative.
Front Cover
The front covers include the following information (top to bottom, with the series name and book number along the left margin):
- title
- illustration
- author’s full name (Rick Riordan)
Spines
The spine’s content is:
- book number
- name of series (with embellishments above and below)
- author’s last name (Riordan)
- title
- publishing company (Disney/Hyperion)
Back Cover
The back covers contain the following information:
- summary
- reviews
- price
- publishing company
- cover designer (Christine Kettner)
- cover illustrator (John Rocco)
- publishing company website
- ISBN/bar code
Brainstorming
There are actually 5 books in this series. I originally wanted to pick these 3: The Last Olympian, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Lightning Thief because they had the biggest impact on my childhood. These are the 1st, 4th and 5th books in the original 5-book series.
However, it seemed weird to simply skip over the middle 2 books in the series, as that leaves a lot of hole in both the plot and the interrelatedness of the covers.
I decided instead to focus on some themes:
- Percy keeps relationships with the mortal side of his family, especially his mom, who makes a lot of sacrifices to try to keep him safe during his childhood.
- Percy has a somewhat distant relationship with Poseidon, his father, but he often acts in ways that seek his father’s approval, such as through heroic acts. He also derives his sea powers from his father. The other gods generally view Percy as potentially dangerous, but admit that he has grit as a hero to do their bidding.
- Percy makes friends who are often neither mortal nor gods, but exist in a sort of gray area. His close companions include Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson, who are a demigod (half god and half mortal), a satyr (ages half as fast as humans and reincarnates as a plant), and a monster (who can disintegrate but regenerate). The main relationships throughout the series focus on Percy and his friends.
Initial Sketches
Seaweed Brain
Annabeth starts calling Percy “Seaweed Brain” in the first book, at first in anger that Percy has done something stupid. Eventually, it becomes a term of endearment. Even though Annabeth calls Percy this, I think it actually represents their characters coming together. Being a child of Athena, Annabeth is often the brains of the friend group. The seaweed represents Percy as he is a son of Poseidon. By wrapping the brain in seaweed this symbolizes that through their adventures and experiences together, Annabeth and Percy grow closer.
Cursed Kicks
In The Lightning Thief, soon-to-be-enemy Luke gives Percy a pair of flying shoes. However, they were actually a ruse and were meant to kill Percy. Percy lets Grover wear the shoes so that his friend could have a magic item and feel less left out. What results is that Luke’s gift almost kills Grover, but Percy and Annabeth save him in the nick of time. This book cover symbolizes the importance of having real friends who actually have your best interest at heart.
The bottomless pit represents the immense dangers of misplaced trust, and the shoes are crossed because it is a warning that symbolizes how Percy learned who his real friends are the hard way. The scorpion design on the shoe represents the time that Luke pretended to offer Percy soda in the woods but instead isolated him with the intent to kill him.
Pawn of the Gods
This design represents how the demigods and other heroes are forced to do the biddings of the gods, who use them to look good and take credit for their accomplishments. At one point, Percy is literally forced to hold up the weight of the sky, a job meant for the Titan (ultra mega god) Atlas. The pawn on the cover has a large dark cloud balanced on top of this, which represents how at many points throughout the series it seems like Percy and his friends are forced to save the world on behalf of the gods.
Be Free
Percy’s mother thought that by marrying such a smelly person, Percy’s demigod scent would be masked and he would be safe from monsters during his childhood. However, after his first quest, Percy brings back the head of Medusa, whose eyes have the power to petrify mortals. Percy urges his mother to “get rid” of his stepfather and to pursue her own dreams and interests. This toolkit represents Percy growing out of his mother’s need to protect him, and simultaneously encouraging her to take matters into her own hands.
Percy also mailed Medusa’s head to Olympus as it was the first time he had something to show for his acts, and he wanted Poseidon’s approval. The title words “be free” also represent how Poseidon tells Percy that the sea does not like to be restrained, which helps Percy gain the motivation to find his own path through his actions.
Prophecy
On Percy’s 16th birthday, Annabeth hands him a cupcake with blue icing that she and Tyson made. The prophecy that was revealed in the final book seemed to hint that Percy would have to die to save the world. This moment with the cupcake would not have even happened. This represents how the words of prophecies can be very confusing and can unfold in unexpected ways. But now at the end of the series, it seems like Percy can enjoy spending some time with his friends at last without having to worry about whether the world would end.
The blue icing represents Percy’s favorite color and connects to Poseidon, as the sea is blue. It also connects to Percy’s mother, who went out of her way to make blue food for Percy since his childhood. This cupcake represents his friends, and both the mortal and immortal sides of his family.
I want to pick 3 of these that best represent the themes of friends and family. Maybe separating out these groups of people are not the best way to do it, as there are covers that could represent multiple groups. I could make more of a transition that follows Percy’s closeness with others throughout the series.
Initial Digital Iteration
I started by iterating on the Seaweed Brain idea. I felt that this was my most developed idea, and that this symbol was introduced the earliest in the series. Therefore I wanted it to be my first book.
I made the colors bright because I wanted to convey a cute, cheerful sense, one often found in YA/youth books. Seaweed Brain is not really an insult, but rather a cute name that Percy’s girlfriend calls him. I also made the font Avenir to be simple and modern, more appealing to the youth of today.
I wasn’t sure what to put on the back because I felt that I didn’t really like the back covers on the original. There were too many words and there was little continuity between the front cover, the spine, and the back cover. I decided to temporarily try putting a summary, the awards, and some seaweed to grow along the bottom and create a natural-looking scene on the back.
Further Digital Iterations
I continued to iterate on the Seaweed Brain idea. One idea from Rachel was in order to make the brain and the seaweed clash less, I could fill in the brain instead of having an outline. I decided to try this and continued to experiment with the positioning and size of the text. I removed the back cover text because it seemed to crowded, but was unsure what to put there to fill the expanse of space.
I tried to iterate on the Pawn of the Gods idea. I soon realized that it would be difficult to use a similar color scheme throughout the series with this book, so I abandoned the idea pretty quickly. Instead of focusing on Percy’s relationships with 3 different groups of people, I tried to focus on Percy’s innate qualities instead.
Final Digital Iterations & Printed Covers
I gradually realized that in order to tie my books together, I had to think of the symbols in a darker context. They were really about how Percy is too loyal to the people he loves, and he often gets dragged into traps as a result. Seaweed Brain represents how he doesn’t think clearly with his head. I decided to have the seaweed brain dragged downwards in the water, to represent being dense and not thinking smartly.
The books grow darker and darker because the extent of Percy’s loyalty grows throughout the series, which often gets him into more and more trouble. Cursed kicks represents how blindly trusting someone he thought was his friend almost got him dragged into the pits of hell. For a similar reason, the shoe is dragging downwards (as seen by the bubbles floating upwards) because Percy is dragged down by his excessive loyalty to his friends.
I changed the font of the covers to be a little more Greek-looking, as the series revolves around Greek mythology. However, Heculanum was too Greek-looking and proved to reduce legibility.
I decided that the final book in the series should be one of a glimmer of hope. Percy was not supposed to live long enough to eat this cupcake, but he did, and he managed to save most of his friends and most of the world. He did sacrifice a lot along the way, which is why the background color of this book is still dark. The pinkness of the cupcake stands out from the background, which is in contrast to cursed kicks, where the shoe does not stand out much from the background. This is because the cupcake represents a change for the better. The cupcake also floats upward (evidenced by the bubbles flowing downward) to represent this hope, this belief that although Percy saved most of his friends, he didn’t have to destroy the entire world to do so.
The quotes on the back are meant to highlight Percy’s excessive loyalty. First, he doesn’t think straight and he ends up doing dumb actions in the process. Then, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, points out what his flaw is, which Percy himself does not view as a flaw. Finally, Athena was convinced that Percy would destroy everything, but he proved her wrong when he managed to save both the world and his friends.
I decided to keep the back relatively simple. It didn’t feel right to copy over the original back cover content and it felt too crowded and messy. So one quote to capture the main idea of each book cover I made felt suitable.
I also decided to use seaweed to enumerate the books: 1 cluster for book 1, 2 for book 2, and so on. I wanted the back to be a continuation from the front, so both are underwater scenes. I tried to make the seaweed grow in a more realistic and natural formation by having bushes instead of single vertical seaweed. The bubbles went from milky white to clear, in an effort to produce a more realistic underwater scene.
I decided to change the background from bright blue. The bright colors were clashing a lot, and the subject matter became darker, so the water became darker as a result. I decided to try to create the look of sunlight filtering through the ocean because Percy’s character is tied a lot to the sea, and the water of the background looked more realistic this way.
After printing, I was surprised that the colors of the book did not change much. I felt that the gloss from the amount of ink on the paper helped brighten the cover a little bit.
From this project, I learned about balancing warmer and colder hues, as well as brighter and darker colors to create contrast and emphasis. I also learned about the importance of shapes, and how to use Adobe Illustrator in a more fluent manner.
