Project 4 Design Process

From the three books I’ve chosen, I firstly came up with these 15 sketches of my book cover (5 sets).

The tool was really limited. There weren’t too many color options with the markers I have so far. The sketch was just a rough idea of how the cover will be set up.

I decided to do the 4th one digitally. Although the last one was also one of my favorite, I guess it would be hard to draw it digitally.

I made 3 gradient first using Adobe Indesign.

From left to the right, they are for:

1. The Little Prince (night)
2. Alice in Wonderland (dusk)
3. The Wind in the Willows (dawn)

I also wanted some element from the book at the left bottom of the page. So for The Little Prince, I traced a planet. And this is what I have by 10/25:

I put some geometric shape elements on the first cover, and still trying to decide if I should put the exactly same circles on the other two or do something different. My next goal is to align all the texts on the same position.

2015/11/5 Documentation Continue:

After printing out the previous version, I realized the title and author’s name were too small and didn’t have enough contrast with the background. Thus I enlarged them and settled them in the middle of the book, created the border around the title to attract more attention. I also played around with the shade of “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wind in the Willows”, in order to have the font color in accord.

I added more shapes into the three covers, hoping to reveal more contents of the books.

The Little Prince: Circles for the planet.

Alice in Wonderland: Spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts for the cards. I also adjusted the secondary color on the bottom of the cover to be lilac, so the whole theme would be more vivid.

The Wind in the Willows: Wavy shapes to mimic breeze. The dark green part on left top is for the shades of the trees.

At this point I finished all three illustrations for the covers, although they all seemed to have different styles… The two swirling lines on Alice in Wonderland were to add some weirdness taste into this fantasy.

These were the first version of the spine and back cover. At this point, my instructor offered me several suggestions:

1. Change the size of the font on the spine. Distinguish their hierarchies by the weight instead of size.
2. Make the three illustrations same style.
3. Change the hue/saturation of Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows a little bit (decrease the amount of brown in it).
4. Make the inner border thinner and delete the outer border.

Following the instruction, these were what I came up with.

The final version doesn’t have that much difference than the previous one. I merely changed the text on the back cover for more simplicity. If you connect all three book covers, they could be connected by the color gradient on it, which also agrees with their themes: early morning (The Wind in the Willows), dawn (Alice in Wonderland), and night (The Little Prince).

Hope you like it. :)

— Angela Xie