Project Four — Shape & Color

Print: 2016: Individual Project

About the Project

Design three covers for a trilogy of books with a design emphasis on color and shape. The three covers should communicate their commonality with a unified design theme. Individually, each book should be singular. Overall, the design should adhere to the design principles we learned thus far, namely, hierarchy (typographic, color, and spatial) and expression. Again, Gestalts principles should be front and center taking into concern, similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, symmetry and order.

The pieces should be designed in Adobe Illustrator and sized to fit over three books as operational book covers. As such, the books should be designed to address the books cover in addition to the back cover and spine. There are three aditional contraints to the design. One: the same color pallete must be applied across all three covers. The color pallete is restricted to 3–4 hues plus black and white. Two: A max of two type families are allowed across all covers. Three: The books must have the same height and width.

Overall, a successful piece will effectively communicate a commonality through all three covers and demonstrate an understanding of color and shape in the architecture of design.

Research

Series: Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales

The Juniper Tree

Author: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

Summary: A mother dies after giving birth to a son and requests to be buried underneath a juniper tree. The child’s father remarries and they have a daughter. The step-mom, wants her daughter to inherit the families wealth not her step-son. To do so, the step-mom murders her step-son. The daughter is mislead into believing she killed her step-brother. The step-mother decides not to tell her husband and cooks the murdered boy into stew. Having witnessed the murder, a bird drops a stone on the step-mother, killing her.

The Ear of Corn

Author: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

Summary: God witnessed a women using corn to clean her muddy son. Angry over their lack of respect for corn, God banished corn from mankind. Bystanders pleaded for mercy. God relinquished and corn returned.

Three Little Pigs

Author: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

Summary: Three littles pigs left home to explore and wander free. As autumn came they decided to build three respective homes. The laziest pig built a straw home. The second laziest pig build a twig home. The third pig, the hardest working pig, built a brick home. A wolf came to town looking for lunch. He blew the straw house down, and the pig scurried to his brothers wooden house. The wolf blew down the wooden home and the two pigs scurried to their brother brick home. Unable to blow down the brick home, the wolf decided to go down the chimny. The wold landed in a fire and scurried off into the woods with a burnt tail, never to come back.

Project Process

I first set out to choose a common theme for the trilogy. Intrigued by incorporating emojis into my design for their bright color and shape driven design, I looked to Grimm’s Brothers books after seeing some titles I thought would lend themselves well to emoji’s. Wikipedia had a wealth of information on fairy tales written by the Grimms’ Brothers. I had a difficult time choosing the titles. There were a plentitude “design-able” Grimms’ Brother titles. Everything from “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage” to “Donkey Cabbages”, to “The Turnip”. I decided on: “The Ear of Corn”, “Three Little Pigs” and “The Juniper Tree”. I thought these titles offered a lot of creative freedom, and were short in titular length, this way I could pursue a typographic shape design if that is where my inspiration turned.

After developing my sketches for the afore chosen books, I set to explore the the sketch I felt had the most potential. I first investigated positioning the title center aligned on the cover with tiny caricatures sitting at the bottom of the cover. Initially, when sketching the concept, I thought the tiny characters would be a strict interpretation of emojis or derived most directly from actually emojis. For the “Three Little Pigs” I intended to have a bunch of emoji pigs piled up on the bottom of the book with the cover’s borders acting as a container. For the “The Ear of Corn” I would have a bunch of tiny corn emojis piling up from the bottom and same for the “Juniper Tree”. However, after creating a juniper tree in Illustrator I decided that piling the trees on the bottom simply didn’t look “right”.

Unsure where to go I turned my attention to choosing a color palette. Having struggled with Adobe Illustrators process for selecting color, I decided to go with a slight variant of pure yellow, pure magenta and pure blue as they were already in the Adobe’s color library. This offered a bright pop of color that contradicted with the strangely grim content of the Grimm’s tales. I thought it was interesting and worked well against a white background. Plus, it really made the details of the tree stand out making the tree seem much more intricate than reality. To further this allusion I shrunk the tree down. These train of events lead me to my first iteration.

After the first critique, I decided two things: my books might be too simple and the color scheme needed work. Working from here, I decided to spear each of the emojis with a spear, as a sort of play on kabobs. The Grimms’ books are just that: grim, so I thought the weirdness of having corn, trees and pigs on kabobs fit the theme. But it was too strange. I decided to pursue another sketch of mine with the text of the title becoming geometric shapes. After pursuing this idea for two covers, the concept did not come to fruition as I hoped. Plus, the process was tedious. I was in the pit of design: spending a lot of time on an idea that looked good in graphite and thought but not digitally. After a critique with the professor, I decided to revert back to my original idea and finish designing the front and spine with special attention to typography.

This lead me to my final design. After experimenting with different colors I decided to go all the way to CMYK: 100%C, 100%M, 100%Y. I switched the pig to be primarily pink and the tree to primarily blue. I added a brief summary on the back of each cover to further accentuate the common theme of the “strangeness” to the tales. Finally, I decided to put a silhouette on the back of the of the book covers to follow Gestalt principle of symmetry. Overall, I believe the simplicity of the design allowed the emphasis to remain on the core values of the project: color and shape.

Pen Tool Animal

Color Palettes

Sketches

Iterations

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten