Project Four: Form & Color
Final Iteration
Book Series Selection
The three books I selected for this project are Scarface by Armitage Trail, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi. Although they are not an actual series and are written by different authors, they all fall under the category of American crime novels and depict the lives of Sicilian/Italian-American crime families.
These novels take place in three sequential eras. Scarface is based on the rise and fall of Al Capone in the 1920’s, The Godfather is inspired by the “Five Familes” that dominated New York organized crime from the 1930’s to the early 60’s, and Wiseguy is the non-fiction life story of Henry Hill, an associate of the Lucchese crime family from 1955 to 1980.
I chose these books because I am a big fan of their onscreen adaptations, and to be honest, I have only read The Godfather and Wiseguy. Since these books are relatively dated, I believe it will be a fun challenge to try and modernized their covers while staying true to their content.
Cover Contents
Scarface
Front Cover:
- Title: “Scarface”
- Author: “Armitage Trail”
- Text: “The bloody, bullet-spattered novel based on Al Capone — America’s most notorious public enemy” (1959 Dell Edition)
- Imagery: Newspaper reporting about Scarface (1929 First Edition), Scarface smoking a cigar (1959 Dell Edition), Picture of Tony Montana (2005 Bloomsbury Edition)
Spine:
- Title: “Scarface”
- Author: “Trail” (1929 First Edition), “Armitage Trail” (1959 Dell Edition)
- Publishing Company: “A•L Burt Company” (1929 First Edition)
Back Cover:
- Text: “Tony Guarino was exactly eighteen when he killed his first man…” (1959 Dell Edition)
- Body: “The man was Al Spingola, one of the city’s important gang leaders, a dangerour and ruthless killer. That he himself might have been killed never occurred to the swaggering young hoodlum. Al had a woman and Tony wanted her. The daring murder catapulted Guarino into sudden fame. In his particular gangster-ridden, dog-eat-dog world, he had gained the first rung of the ladder of success. The fabulous career of ‘Scarface’ had begun.” (1959 Dell Edition)
The Godfather
Front Cover:
- Title: “The Godfather”
- Author: “Mario Puzo”
- Imagery: A puppeteer’s hand controlling a puppet with a cross and strings
Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
Front Cover:
- Title: “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
- Author: “Nicholas Pileggi”
- Imagery: Revolver, necklace, cigarette, and roll of money
Sketches
During the sketching process, I struggled to think abstractly about the three books I had chosen. They are all classic novels that were transformed into even more classic films, so there were many iconic images that stood out to me. It was very tempting trying to choose something too literal for the covers.
Since these three books are not an actual series, I wanted to make sure I connected them well as a series. My initial idea was to highlight the 3 different types of contraband they dealt with: alcohol, gambling, and cocaine. However, these seemed too literal and secondary to the plots of each title. I very briefly explored the idea of headshots of the main characters for each but then realized it was way too literal for the assignment. My last sketch, I explored the theme of violence as a connection for the series and how a single act of violence was the turning point for each novel. For this, I rearranged the series so that the covers would visually connect when laid side by side. The revolver that Michael Corleone uses to shoot Sollozo shoots a bullet that pierces Tony Camonte’s brother on the next cover, which in turn kills Tommy DeVito in Wiseguy under the pretenses of becoming a made man. This order follows the order of the release of the movies, which was interesting. I liked the idea of violence being the connection since they all contain such notable acts of violence, so I kept that in mind when moving to digital iterations.
Digital Iterations
First Digital Iteration
Although I was stuck with my sketches, I decided to move on to digital iterations since they’re usually easier for me and help me get inspired. The first thing I did was create my color scheme. I knew I wanted to use some shade of red because it is reminiscent of blood, and I wanted to minimize the amount of colors used to follow the assignment directions. I eventually settled different shades of red, white, and black with the plan of using each color as the background color, image color, and text color for each of the covers in different combinations.
I started by creating the scars from my very first sketch for the cover of Scarface. I felt it did a good job of capturing the essence of the novel, tie in the connecting element of violence, and being abstract enough. I made the scars geometric since it was easier than trying to vector out the actual scars from an image of Al Capone. I actually liked how they looked and continued with this theme for the other covers.
For The Godfather, I chose to use the image of a rose because it is the most romanticized version of organized crime out of the three and provides a break from the senseless killing in the other two.
For Wiseguy, I chose the image of Tony DeVito getting shot from behind as it is both iconic, violent, and would be interesting to create geometrically.
I chose Baskerville for my type because each of these novels are older, classic novels, and I felt that a sans serif type would be inappropriate.
Final Iteration
The main feedback I received on my first iterations was to work on incorporating type and to try a sans serif type. At this point, I really struggled iterating further, as my biggest fear was doing something “corny” or disrespectful towards these three bodies of work. I tried incorporating multiple sans serif fonts and different designs but honestly disliked them all. In fact, I did not save any of them or send anything for feedback to the instructor. To me, I felt like I was creating covers that were more disrespectful than Sofia Coppola’s acting in The Godfather Part III. Then, and even now, I wish I chose three titles I cared less about. Eventually, I forced myself to get past this by rationalizing that using a sans serif type would help make the books appear more accessible, which is important since I have never been able to successfully persuade anyone to watch any of these films with me.
I settled on Futura for my typeface and began iterating by changing all the type, and making the images bigger. Rather than framing my composition with type, I wanted to incorporate type, so I removed the white space that would be left behind. This involved rotating the rose, centering the imagery of the headshot, and adjusting the positions of the scars. I experimented by adding additional geometric shapes to the cover of Scarface and breaking up the scar into several triangles, but it ended up looking messy and I opted against it. I added a bullet to the cover of Wiseguy to make it slightly more clear to viewers what is going on, since some people were unsure about this during the crit.
Saumya suggested having the type interleave with the designs, which I feel I achieved to some success. I feel it worked best for Wiseguy, as it gave an almost 3D effect.
For the spines, I aligned the author, title, and years and also added the number of each book in the series as well as a condensed version of the cover art, which can be viewed from the side.
For the back, I started by placing the text from the original covers. Saumya suggested having additional geometric shapes that wrap the text, but it didn’t look great. I tried having the text wrap around a large “S”, “G”, and “W” for each of the covers, but before I got to it, I saw how nice it looked with just the letters in the background. It didn’t make it difficult to read and when viewing all three artboards at once, they looked great as a series, so I stuck with it.
