Project 4 — Process Documentation

Designing book covers for a series.

For this project, we had to design book covers for a choosen series. I chose to do my series on the Hunger Games series. First we had to look up the content of our series for our covers.

Next we moved into the sketching phase. We had to consider creating a book design/concept that worked individually and also cohesively across the series. First I was brainstorming a single illustration in the middle of the page while using some of the iconic symbols used in the books/movies. Then I my professor suggested trying to stay away from the already created icons and try to think about using typography or abstract/simple illustration in my design.

I struggled with coming up with a design I thought was interesting and passionate about while still representing the main theme of the book as we moved into digitizing. This is my first round of digitizing the first book (Hunger Games).

I didn’t come up with “the” idea until our class was introduced to several Swiss posters here at CMU. I was inspired by a Swiss poster called “30 Jahre (Years).”

This is my idea that resulted from the Swiss poster collection class.

After discovering the idea that I would push further, I started fresh and digitized all the books in the series (including spine and back cover). Here is my round 1 book cover series design for mid-critique.

I received a lot of good feedback on sticky notes, however, I met with my professor afterwards and changed the idea for the entire series. The book designs from the mid-critique were not working well as a series. From the conversation, the Mockingjay book cover was working the best and so I decided to make the cracks the theme for all three books. For my individual meeting I was able to redesign all three book covers with the cracked theme.

After this meeting, I was asked to push the spine and back cover. My professor suggested thinking about alignment and making sure the cracks feel organic.

Here is what my final book cover for the series looked like.