Project Four

Shape & Color

The purpose of this project was to work with both shapes and colors to create three book covers that represented a series. The covers had to work both individually and together and the series could be an existing one or one that we made up ourselves.

For this project, I chose to do covers for three Roald Dahl books that I have enjoyed a lot during my time in elementary school. These were Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach.

Inspiration

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Matilda

James and the Giant Peach

Book Summaries

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. One fate, one short, one lean. These horrible crooks, so different in looks, were none the less equally mean…

Boggis, Bunce and Bean are the nastiest three farmers you could ever meet. They hate Mr. Fox and plan to shoot, starve, or dig him out of his hole. But Mr. Fox is much cleverer than they are and he has a cunning plan of his own.

Matilda

Matilda is an exceptionally bright young girl with an insatiable appetite for books and reading. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood, think she’s just a nuisance. Matilda thinks, rightly, that all they are interested in is watching TV and making money by cheating people. She decides to punish them. She soon discovers that she has supernatural powers which are not only going to prove useful at home but also at Cruncham Hall School where Matilda and her classmates must Content with the scariest headmistress of them all. Miss Trunchbull.

James and the Giant Peach

An enormous escaped rhinoceros from London Zoo has eaten James’s parents. And it gets worse!

James is packed off to live with his two really horrible aunts Sponge and Spiker. Poor James is miserable, until something peculiar happens and James finds himself on the most wonderful and extraordinary journey he could ever imagine…

Sketches

Going from left to right, for the first set of book cover sketches I wanted to explore the idea of having a large image towards the bottom right that draws people towards the book and a title above the image. It seemed to work well for both James and the Giant Peach with the giant peach and Matilda with the pile of books as those pictures had a line that represented a “ground” but for Fantastic Mr. Fox, the tail felt like it was floating in the air.

For the second set of sketches, I wanted to explore the idea of having a smaller graphic each with one or two elements to them and the simplicity of this design. Fantastic Mr.Fox would have paw prints and a fox hole, Matilda would have a floating book and James and the Giant Peach would have the bag of crocodile tongues and a peach.

For the third set of sketches, I had somewhat large objects that came in from the right and at a slant. Fantastic Mr. Fox would have a fox tail, James and the Giant Peach would have the peach rolling downhill, and Matilda would have a large book.

The fourth set consists of a text that go across the middle of a large graphic. There would be a fox for Fantastic Mr. Fox, a bow and book for Matilda, and balloons and the peach for James and the Giant peach.

Digital Iterations

First Iteration

I ultimately chose to continue with the sketches that had images on the bottom left corner of the cover and a title around 2/3 of the way up from the bottom of the book. I chose to have a colored background in hopes to make the covers more playful but a san-serif typeface and white images for a more simple look. I made each cover have 2 graphics with grey lines to enhance the idea that this book is a series.

Second Iterations and Critique

For this iteration, I tried to make the books more like a series by having only the top portion of the cover be colored and have the summary on the back of the book be divided by the line that forms between the colored portions and the uncolored ones. I also made one graphic of the book black while the other the color of corresponding to the book.

The layout of these covers created a bit of a hierarchy issue between the title and the graphics as the title’s placement at the 1/3 down from the top of the book made the eye rest there but the colors of the graphics would then draw the eye down.

The second version of the covers were the covers that I brought to a critique in class. It had a white cover with text in colors corresponding to each book, a black graphic, a white graphic outlined in grey, and two paragraph summaries on the back that had different colors for each paragraph.

The feedback given for these covers was that the title and the graphics still competed with each other. Because the title was so small, the black graphics really drew the attention away. The back cover was a bit better with hierarchy but the font size was too similar and there was also a bit of competition. The graphics were not completely intuitive in what they were supposed to be representing. Finally, the covers were not very playful and thus not very like children’s books.

Third Iteration

For the fourth iteration I tried to fix the hierarchy issues with the cover by significantly decreasing the size of the body text on the back cover and increasing the quotation text. For the front cover, I increased the size of the title. I updated the graphics to make them more recognizable. The peach has a point at the bottom, the fox hole has a bit of a shadow, and the bow is not as rigid. I also added color back to parts of the graphic as well as experimented with the typeface to create a more playful feel to the books. Ultimately, I did not like the typeface choice of this iteration and the graphics still competed with the title.

Final Iteration

In the final iteration, I went back to the font I had previously. I increased the size of the title significantly and made the backgrounds of the front cover and spines colored to increase the playfulness of the covers. I updated the bow in Matilda to be more like a ribbon to be more representative of the book. I also made each of the graphics have 3 colors: white and two shades different shades of each book’s corresponding color. Because the title increased so much in size, I moved Roald Dahl towards the bottom right corner of the front cover from the top left, where it originally was. Lastly, I changed the linespacing of the back cover so that the paragraph was justified. For the quotes, I made all of them 3 lines but let them have a bit of a rag so that there were not just two blocks of text on the back cover. I kept the back cover white because I wanted the text to pop out, which was something that I was unable to achieve with a colored background.

Photos