Project Four — Form & Color
Kruti Koppolu
Project Background
Project four revolves around creating book covers for three books. The covers have to be distinctive, but the key is to incorporate or emphasize a strong connection between each book. This assignment involves the use of Gestalt’s principles, hierarchy, and balance between form and function to effectively communicate the essence of each book.
My Books
The three books that I’ve chosen for this project can be found below —
1. The Girl On A Train
- Author: Paula Hawkins
- New York Times #1 Bestseller
2. The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo
- Author: Stieg Larsson
- Volume 1 of the Millennium Trilogy
- New York Times #1 Bestseller
3. The Girl In The Woods
- Author: Gregg Olsen
- New York Times #1 Bestseller
Design Process
Stage 1 — Sketching
For this project, the first and foremost step was to sketch — sketch out as many ideas, thoughts and visuals as you could. To begin with, I wrote down my thoughts about the books I had chosen and some of the elements I felt were important links between the three that should be highlighted. These can be seen in the image below.
After writing down my thoughts, I began to sketch. I sketched mainly ideas that I had for the three books, with a side focus on the spines. At first I focused quite literally on the “girl” aspect included in the titles and clubbed them with images of trains, woods/forests and dragons. The ideas I had brought out what a reader would immediately think of when reading the title of the book. As I kept sketching, my ideas began to evolve a bit and started to incorporate elements such as texture (using leaves, train tracks and scales) into the image. This in turn reflected how I began to think more about how I wanted to represent my books visually and what I wanted the reader to takeaway from the cover itself. My sketches can be found below.
I was pretty disatisified with my sketches. Even though they did display a progression in how I was thinking about my book jackets, they didn’t quite convey a message or anything about the kind of story each novel contained. Picking up and looking at one of those covers would not have told me anything about the story or what to expect. In fact, this feeling was hit home while watching a video about designing book covers. In the video the speaker shows a picture of an apple and then underneath that the word “Apple”. He says its important to remember that either you display the picture of an apple or you display the text but not both. Displaying both is treating your audience like a moron and you never want to do that. Unfortunately, I felt like I was doing just that.
Stage 2 — First Round of Digital Iterations
Another important observation I made after I finished sketching was that I hadn’t played around with typefaces, spacing or any similar aspects of the cover to bring out the essence of the book much. However, I did a lot of this in my digital iterations.
In this round of digital iterations, I began to play around with different typefaces and different placements. I also included visual elements but not as center or main elements as I did in my sketches. Most importantly, I began to think of the book jacket — the back, spine and front — as one piece and not three individual ones. Some of my initial digital iterations can be found below.
Stage 3 — More Digital Iterations
After my first round of digital iterations, I feel like I didn’t have a good idea of what I wanted yet and the only way to achieve that was to continue iterating. I continue to work with typefaces and spacing, as I felt like that was the most effective way for me to bring out the horror/mystery essence of the novels instead of using images. Some of my digital iterations can be found below.
Once I found a placement of the title on the cover that worked, I also began to play around with the spine and the back of the book jacket as well as color.
When it came to the back of the book, I didn’t want to give away too much of the story by including a summary on the back. Keeping in line with the mysterious aspect each of the novels had, I wanted to reveal as much as possible but still provide a hook for the reader to make them want to open the book and find out more. The two most effective ways I thought this would be possible was to include reviews of the novel or to include an intriguing quote or catch phrase from the novel itself.
Stage 4 — Final Designs
In this final stage, I played around a lot with color. Though the black-white-red combination is a little cliche, I figured it best brought out the thriller/horror/murder aspect which is a critical component of all the three stories. While experimenting with other colors, I did like the yellow and black combination but felt it was too close to the color scheme of the actual novel of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. I also tried to use white and grey but didn’t find that combination to be very effective. Some of my iterations with color can be found below.
What I also decided was an effective use of color was to highlight one word in the quotes on the backs of the novels for emphasis.
My final designs can be found below —
I made the color scheme of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” different from the other two novels. This is partly due to the fact that this book has elements that really differentiate it from the other two such as its setting (it’s located in Sweden while the other two are located in America), the fact that it’s a lot bloodier than the other two novels, and that it is the first installment of a trilogy while the other two are standalone novels. As a result, I wanted the design to reflect those differences but also maintain a link/connection with the other two novels.
I added the blocks on the spine because I felt like they made the spine look a lot cleaner instead of having the texture run across the entire spine. Additionally the blocks on the spine allow the top and bottom of the texture to aline with the top and bottom of the text on the cover which I thought further added to the cleanliness across the entire jacket.
Reflections
Overall, I found this assignment to be really difficult. I was incredibly excited when we first received it, but as we went through it, it definitely seemed like something out of my ball park. I really struggled with visualizing the essence of the novel and deciding what I wanted to convey. Through the difficulty, I learned a lot not only in terms of software and design in general, but also how I think and what needs to change and what it really means to be an effective communicator. For a long time I was really just focused on the aesthetic part of this project and this proved to be a road block for a long time. While this assignment really pushed me more than the previous ones, and I’m happy with my final designs compared to what I began with, I frankly feel they have the potential to be developed more and be better.
