Project 4: Book Cover Design
Print
October 6-November 3, 2016
Individual Project
About the Project
This project is the forth one for the Communication Deign Fundamentals class, Fall 2016. In this project we were expected to engage form, color and typography to create book cover for a series of books of similar theme. In this project, we need to think about how to communicate the theme of the book through form and color. We also have to use the right treatment for type to match with the form we create. Type can also blend into the forms to become one element of the form.
Ideation and Initial Sketches
I chose Lonely Planet, the popular travel guide book series as my series of book and I selected the three books: Lonely Planet Myanmar, Lonely Planet Cambodia and Lonely Planet Jamaica initially, for the reasons that first, these three countries have very different feature and therefore enable me to do very different treatment on each of them; secondly, I have these three books already. To generate ideas, I created a series of thumbnail sketches.
I came up with six ideas and created six series of sketches for each of the three books. the six ideas are: 1. simple color background with a tiny illustration in the middle. 2. Same composition of form all across three books with different colors characteristic to the countries. 3. High fidelity illustration. 4. Illustrative shapes. 5. Expressing colored painting made in Corel Painter. 6. Composition based on the physical shape of the country on map. I evaluate each ideas and decided to proceed with the fifth one: expressive painting made in Corel Painter.
First Iteration
I started off with a very simple idea: use the same style of painting, but with different color characteristic to the country it is representing. In the meantime, I did the same experiment on countries that were not in the initial list of books, like Indonesia and New Zealand. I later found out that Indonesia and New Zealand were actually more distinct in some ways therefore easier to create pieces more recognizable. I therefore switched my books to be Lonely Planet Indonesia, New Zealand and Jamaica.
I then very quickly realized that I could not create anything iconic or easily recognizable if I do not pick up some features distinct about the countries I selected. I should base my painting on these features instead of just randomly picking colors. Then I decided what characteristic features I want to represent for each country.
Indonesia: Its volcano
New Zealand: Its natural landscape
Jamaica: Its beaches
In the meantime, I realized that it would make the design too simple and lack of variation if I make then all into the same style with difference only in color. Therefore I decided to make a different texture for each of the countries but all of then still within a similar overall style so that they can be easily recognized as one series of books.
The first texture is made up with blue and yellow grains resembles ocean wave and beaches and therefore represents Jamaica. The second one has color of lava and rock and resembles lava flow, therefore representing Indonesia. The last one in my opinion is less clear than the first two. It represents purity and therefore signify the feature of New Zealand.
I wrote one quote each that would summarize the country the best and put it next to the title on the front cover. Because I made all the designs in CMYK color space, it looks a bit off here on Medium. I thought the principle of Lonely Planet is to make people’s trip easier and therefore the design should communicate simplicity. I therefore chose a very simple san serif typeface: Futura in my first iteration.
Second Iteration
After my individual session with my instructor, a few problem with my first iteration were discovered:
1. My choice of color was not deliberate enough
2. My piece for New Zealand doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
3. My treatment for type was not interesting enough. At the time it was plainly on top of the text.
I address these problems in my second iteration. This time, we need to design not only the front but also the back and the spine of the book. Therefore I re-drew all the paintings with more deliberate section of color and shape, in a size that would span both the front and back of the book cover.
I had a bit of a hard time with the treatment for the typeface for the title. Definitely the simple san serif typeface doesn’t work but no better idea came to me for a long while. I proceeded to do some exploration with script typefaces. I chose three similar but unified typefaces for each of the book and landed on my second iteration.
Final Iteration
From my second iteration, feedback from my instructors showed that:
- The choice of typeface for the title was clearly not working.
- The logo I created lack fitness
- Using different typeface for the title on the front cover and the spine was not working.
- The text on the back of the book was very hard to read and the making it italic didn’t really make a lot of sense.
I addressed all these points and spent a lot more time on the choice for typeface. This time I selected a serif typeface Trajan and came up with an idea to blend the type into the texture itself. I created a mask in Photoshop for each one of the book and create an overlay on top of the title.
This created another dimension for both the form and the type and made the design look much more visually interesting overall.
