Project 4: The book covers
The purpose of this project was to create three book covers that worked both together and separately. We could either pick an existing series, or make one of our own, and use the skills developed in this course to evoke theme, continuity, and other interesting details between the books.
I decided to work with three controversial books: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Song of Solomon, and Lolita. These are books that I loved to read, but also hated to read, because of the dark twists that lie within each of them.
The first step to constructing these covers was to collect information on them, including their summaries and what some of the previous covers looked like. Here’s what I found:
Summaries
Perfume:
In the slums of 18th-century Paris a baby is born. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille clings to life with an iron will, growing into a dark and sinister young man who, although he has no scent of his own, possesses an incomparable sense of smell. He apprentices himself to a perfumer and quickly masters the ancient art of mixing flowers, herbs, and oils. But his quest to create the “ultimate perfume” leads him to commit a series of brutal murders until no woman can feel safe as his final horrifying secret is revealed.
Song of Solomon:
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison audaciously transfigures the coming-of-age story. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Lolita:
Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Current Covers
Perfume:
I really enjoy the hair and flowers in these covers, and the richness of all three of these designs. There’s an eerie sort of elegance to them. I like the deep reds and oranges a lot, especially because they link to the hair of the one of the major targets of Grenouille in the novel.
Song of Solomon:
This book is about flight, and I love the rich blues and creams, and the wings that are in the middle cover.
Lolita:
Lolita’s skirt, lollipop, and lips are the commonly featured on covers of this book, to depict the twisted juvenile sensuality in the book. I love the pop-art feel of the last cover pictured here, and the vintage feel of the typefaces used in all these covers. They evoke a sign-painted feel.
Possible Palettes:
I then looked at colors that I liked most from these covers, and compiled a few pallets. Here are some that I considered:
The common colors that popped up in the selections that I made, were reddish-oranges, some sort of ochre tone, and deep reds. There were blues as well, but the ones I liked most were on the darker side of the spectrum.
Sketches
It was then time to start thinking about how I wanted to arrange the elements that I liked for each cover, on the page. Below are the initial sketches that I put together:
The approach I took to creating these first sketches, was to draw the main elements that came to my mind when I thought of each of the three books. I started using black or hashed bars to bring in the feeling of censorship, and tried to decide for myself what the most symbolic aspect of each book was. I took to sketching more simplified versions on what could potentially be book covers. Here’s what I put together:
I went to spreading the faces across the cover, to blowing up the eyes to evoke the point of view of each of the books’ protagonists. I finally started noticing the elements that I was unconsciously drawing over and over again. For Perfume, it was the hair and the perfume bottle. For Lolita, it was the lollipop and the heart sunglasses. For Song of Solomon, it was wings. I took these symbols and put together the following sketches:
The first of these is for Perfume. The hair, a symbol of the virgins that are murdered in the book, turning to perfume, was the major symbol I wanted. I was thinking of turning the perfume to blood.
For Lolita, I blew up the mouth with the lollipop to create a provocative view of an innocent activity. I also wanted the heart sunglasses to be present somewhere on the cover.
For Song of Solomon, I wanted the wings. To provide a comment on beauty and blackness, I twisted the famous Venus De Milo, and took away her belly button (to allude to one of the major characters).
These were the sketches that I took forward into digital iterations.
Digital Iterations
I knew I wanted illustrations, specifically those that I had done by hand, to be major focus points of each cover, but wanted to be able to manipulate my drawings more easily. For this reason, I took to attempting to master the brush tool on illustrator, and traced my drawings from photographs that I took. Below is the first full set of iterations that I put together for the mid-crit.
The typeface that I chose was “Loki Cola”, which is a knock-off of the famous “Coca-cola” font. This was an idea pulled from one of the inspiration covers for Lolita, but it soon became clear that this was not the most legible font choice. It had a nice sense of a vintage feel, but that was about it.
I went with the brightest of the hues from my selected pallets to use the “wow” factor that comes with hot colors, but Song of Solomon suffered from a very dark shade of the red hue that I selected. Additionally, Lolita and Perfume looked almost like the inverse of one another, once again leaving Song of Solomon as a sort of outlier. Song of Solomon also had a massive title panel, that was overwhelming the space, and distancing it from the other covers.
The intricacies of the illustrations were also, definitely, clashing with the titles, and the variations in line thickness further broke continuity between the covers.
My main strength-that was brought up in the crit-was my illustrations. I needed to showcase them more, and think of a way to simplify the chaos of a color pallet that I had compiled.
The back panels of the books were also oddly rigid, compared to the stretched transparent panels on the covers. The change in color for the flaps were interesting, but not enough to overwhelm the back and front like they were.
Final Digital Iterations
While preparing these final iterations, I focused mainly on alterations in color, and detailing on the illustrations. Here’s what I had by the end:
Overarching Edits:
I kept the spines black to bring in that censorship theme that I talked about earlier. I also worked on bringing uniformity in line weight across all the covers, and blew up the images on all three of them. I took away the opaque boxes, and reflected the transparent panels inversely across the spine. I also worked to make the symbols on the back similar in size, and bolded and increased the font size of the important portion of each summary.
The Loki Cola had to go, and in came Regina, another script typeface, with more of a bold, two-dimensional feel to it. It let the illustrations speak for themselves better, and was A LOT easier to move around on the page. I wound up having to cut the authors names from all three covers, for the sake of Song of Solomon, which was reading as “Toni Morrison Solomon” when I tried to bring uniformity in alignment across the covers. It was for the best.
I also brought alignment into the spine, aligning the title with the bottom of the transparent panel on the cover, and the author with that on the back. The panels on the front and back were also the exact same distance from their respective edges of the book cover.
Individual comments:
Perfume:
I decided that the perfume of this book was more symbolically relevant than then hair, and so played with the scale of the bottle. I also ended up going for monochrome backgrounds on all three of the covers, because I really wanted the ochre to help the orange-red pop on this particular cover.
I made all the lines black and tried my best to eliminate those transparent patches I had used before to shade the hair. I brought in the cross-hatching effect I used from the other covers instead, to tie them together better.
On this particular cover, I was super happy with the blood dripping into the perfume bottle, and the color combination.
Lolita:
I will forever be proud of these big ochre lips, and the detail on that lollipop. Blowing up the lollipop really added to the pop art effect that I was going for, and gave the title more room to breathe.
While I love how the sunglasses turned out, I’m still not sure I’m happy with how simple they are compared to the symbols on the other covers. They were, however, something that I was very hesitant to let go of, because of their symbolic importance. That being said, I do like how the simplicity of the shape echoes that of the cover.
Song of Solomon:
The cross-hatching on the Venus, really brought depth to her form. The breasts were hard to shape, but I like the androgynous figure that arose as a result. It speaks to the plot more than I had thought it would.
I was also happy to blow up my drawing to draw as much emphasis as I could to the missing belly-button, and thankfully, that was noticed during our final crits! I’m so happy with how the cream and brown tones look against the mature maroon, and love the pinkish hue that came into the wings after I played around with opacity. The wings are much cleaner on this cover, compared to the last, and match the other symbols much better.
Glamor shots
These book covers took weeks to make, and I am very proud of what I was able to put together. The books that I chose to model my covers on were a set of Yale Shakespeares, which are very small books (only around 6.5 inches tall). I chose these mostly because I see controversial books as things that some feel the need to tuck away, making smaller books, ideal. That’s also why only the spines are black, so that on a shelf, you’re shielded from the scandalizing images that reveal what’s actually in the book.
Here’s a final look at how they look, “out in the wild”. I’d like to thank my lovely book models, Laurel and Margaret, for agreeing to pose for some of these photographs.
