Project 4

For this project we needed to design three book covers that have a matching theme. I chose Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 for my dystopian theme.

Above are my original sketches, I originally wanted to show a character that is going through each story of the books and to show what that character goes through. For 1984 the character is running away from “Big Brother” as in that world everyone is being watched. My character, then runs into the Brave New World where everyone is identical and he feels alone. And for the last sketch my character is on fire as in this story the main character is a fireman that is forced to burn books but rebels.

Below are my digital iterations of these concepts.

After showing my concepts to the class I got a number of comments which led me to change my covers. The first was that my message wasn’t clear, almost everyone didn’t see what I was trying to show. The other was my typeface, there were two issues regarding the typeface, the first was the size of the title and the author's name, the other was the type itself. For these iterations I used Baskerville because I believed it was regularly used for book covers and after looking at some covers which used this typeface I liked it. After listening to the comments I returned to the covers I looked at and realised the typeface wasn’t used for dark stories. The size of the typeface also gave off a confusing message, where the reader didn’t understand what was more important, the title or the author. The colours also needed to be changed as they didn’t give off a dystopian feeling.

I returned to my sketchbook and came up with new ideas which are below.

I thought rather than showing how the character in my sketches felt, I thought of giving my reader a feeling instead. Something that made them feel like they’re in the book or give them a dark impression of the book. For 1984 I focused on the eyes to make the reader feel like they’re being watched. For Brave New World, I wanted to give off a twisted impression of how the society is, as in the book humans are created in a factory. For Fahrenheit 451 I liked my original idea as I thought it worked well, but I felt it would be more effective if he was on his knees.

Below are my digital concepts for these ideas.

Fahrenheit 451 was kept as it was. I changed the BNW and 1984 covers before I did any work on Fahrenheit 451 as I believed they needed the most work. I was happy with how I set up 1984 I felt the eyes made you feel like you were being watched but my typeface still didn’t work. I adjust the size of the typeface to show the importance of the title, but the type itself didn’t work for two reasons. The typeface I used for the title didn’t show that this was a dystopian book, and the eyes on the title were too much. The other thing was the typeface for the author. I used mistral, which gave off too much character.

I didn’t like the cover for BNW the fetas didn’t really look like a fetas, it appeared poorly done and the typeface was completely different than the typeface in 1984. Both covers gave off the impression I wanted but didn’t look as if they were part of a theme.

I redesign the concepts to be more effective in delivering my message

I chose the colour black for my spine and the back of the covers as I wanted to show that they are dark stories, but different stories which is why the front have different colours. I changed the typeface of the author to match each cover and kept it in the corner as it was originally. The same was done with the titles, but the typeface still gave too much character and emotion, then it should for these kind of stories. The graphics also didn’t seem to look as if they were part of a series, the eyes were designed using shapes and the fetas, man and fire were done using image tracing.

I redid the concepts and changed the typeface below

The typeface I went with was Verdana I think it worked perfectly with what I wanted to show. The placement of the of the title to the top left and the author to the bottom right also worked. I removed the flask from the BNW cover, but I felt it didn’t give off the message I wanted it to as it just looked like a fetas. I needed to show that they were being manufactured. The red and orange going across the man didn’t work either they were too bright and out of place. I also added an eye to the back of 1984 and fetas to the back BNW to match the flames on the back of Fahrenheit 451 but the fetas looked out of place and the eye was too much for the reader to see as I felt I was just showing the front cover again.

In regards to colour I felt black on the front across all three covers felt darker and worked well with each image on the front especially the eyes. I chose darker colour for the back and spin of each cover, I chose dark blue because I felt it was always nighttime in 1984 or at least when the character is being watched. I chose a dark red for because Fahrenheit 451 involved a lot of fire and brown because the main character is from a village outside the city.

My final work is below

I removed the orange and red from the flames and added gray instead as I didn’t want to it be plain white, I felt the gray worked and the dark red highlighted the flames.

For BNW I returned the flask and multiplied them to show that they’re being produced in a lab and I want to remove any sign of uniqueness.

I kept the back plain and added one sentence which I felt worked well because of the type of books I was working with. The back just lets you know what you are reading and doesn’t give you any kind of hope.