Project Four

Book cover Design

Introduction: This project’s goal was to create a book cover, using design concepts that we have learned previously. We used typography, shapes, and even color to make suitable series-designs for a series of our choice. I decided to go with Goosebumps since it was a series that I really enjoyed reading as a child. The three books I initially started with were: Monster Blood, Night of the Living Dummy and Werewolf Skin.

Sketches:

I drew 5 sketches each for the three books. The hard part for me was trying to keep the series consistent. I chose the ones that I liked and did digital iterations for them.

Digital Iterations:

Initially, I went with the design of having the same colour and a design in the middle. The one that worked the best for me was the Ghost Next Door where I played around with adding a blood-splatter texture to the figure in the middle.

Interim Crit:

I received a lot of reviews! It seemed that the most important thing that I got out of this was working on having a consistent design that constitute a series. Also I realized that it was very difficult to make a sketch for a dummy’s face, and decided to switch Night of the Living Dummy for a different book. The things that I changed since this crit was, the color scheme, typeface and make revisions on the designs. Because I got the best remarks on the Ghost Next Door, I decided to go with a series-design that is consistent with that one. I decided to go with having a white figure in the middle with text in it, and a background color that would make the series work.

Here, I changed the color so that the hues and saturation were the same, but the colors were different. This maintained the sense of a dark and creepy feel while still seeming like a series. I added footsteps in the back to make the cover more interesting. The series ended up being very simple and I didn’t want to ruin that by adding a long description in the back, so I went ahead and copied the blurb from the actual books (which explains why one of the text in the back has quotation marks and the rest don’t.) All in all, I learned a lot from this project regarding color and sketching/illustration.

Final results:

I think that I could have improved on using grids for the spine, but all in all I consider this a success.