Project Four — Process Documentation
Overview
For our fourth project, we made book covers for a series of 3 related books. We had to use knowledge from many of the topics we’ve covered in class, including typography, hierarchy, color, and gestalt principles to balance form and function and create effective as well as expressive book covers. Our constraints included using only typographic illustration and graphic shapes, 3–4 hues, 2 or less type families, and identically sized books.
Book series
For my series, I decided to go with a dystopian book genre, and chose the books Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and the Giver. These three books are set in dystopian societies where individuality is heavily restricted and citizens are blindly forced to surrender personal liberties for the claimed bettering of the society. I compiled similar information for all three book covers including the author, a few interesting quotes I liked, and a short description of the plot. I also looked at some existing covers for the three books.
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
“Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.”
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”
“‘We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?’”
“‘There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.’”
1984 — George Orwell
“The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell’s prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of “negative utopia” — a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions — a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.”
“Who controls the past controls the future.”
The Giver — Lois Lowry
“The Giver has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community.”
“We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”
“There could be love”, Jonas whispered.
Inspiration/Design References
As a first step, I researched various book covers, both inside and outside of the dystopian genre. I collected the ones what stood out to me or that I liked on a Pinterest board here, and included some below as well. Some themes among the book covers I liked that I identified included the use of simple symbols, simple layouts, and dark colors that alluded to dystopia.
Preliminary Concept Sketches
For my sketches, I tried out various ideas using symbols and simple graphics. My first idea was to have a single symbol for each book, accompanied by the title and author, and I drew out some various placings of these elements. Another idea I had was to put these symbols on the side cover only, and only have text on the front and back. A third idea I had was to incorporate the titles into the symbols, by scaling them up, and placing the titles somewhere within the symbols. Another concept I played with was the idea of using a running graphic along the front, spine, and back of the book, which would demonstrate uniformness and also continuity within the series. Lastly, I tried out a very abstracted concept where I simply used lines to represent the books and their main ideas. For this one, I used a closed line for 1984 to demonstrate oppression, a tangled line to represent ashes and destruction for Fahrenheit 451, and two meandering lines for The Giver to represent the river.
Digital Iterations
Turning my sketches into digital versions, I first tried out the most abstract concept I sketched out, with the single lines. I also tried out making some simple symbols with the brush tool. After trying these out, I decided to move forward with the symbols, and to instead use graphics to give the covers a more modern, uniform look. I also made the decision to use a sans serif font, to convey the sort of futuristic, but not outstanding feel I wanted to communicate. I tried out a couple different sans serif fonts, but ended up going with Rajdhani, which I though was the best fit. After choosing the symbol I wanted to use for each book, I decided to go with the grid theme I sketched, to express the ideas of conformity and the lack of individuality. I set the title and author within the grid, just centered on the front to make it less distracting. Further, I used a unique symbol highlighted with a pop of color set to the right side of the page to represent the main character’s outlying narrative apart from their society. I also chose to put the unique symbol on the spine of the book, to give each book some individuality when you look at the three only from the spine. Lastly, I chose to use a black background and greyscale symbols to go with the dystopian theme, and to make the unique symbol and text really pop out of the page.
The main thing I struggled with after creating this draft and presenting it for our intermediate critiques was the alignment of all of the objects on the covers, as well as the uniformity and hierarchy of the text. I took the different suggestions I got at the critiques, such as replacing the symbol for The Giver, changing the alignment of the body text on the back cover, using a different sans serif font in multiple weights for all of the text, and adding the color along the spine and back of the book, and added these in for my final draft. I also had to refine my grid structure, to make it more uniform for all three books, and really look closely at the alignment of my text with the objects. For example, I moved the quotations outside of the margin lines set by the objects on the back covers, and also tried to align the titles with the objects surrounding them. Lastly, I changed the size and weights of the various pieces of text to show more hierarchy, making the quotations larger and bolder, the authors’ names more readable, and making all of the text for different components across the three books the same size.
Final Covers
For our final critiques, we printed our covers, cut them, folded them, and then put them on hardcover books we measured to get our cover dimensions. After seeing the final product on the books, I liked the general look but noticed a few things I would change in the future. One thing I thought about was that I might change the apple symbol so that it has some physics difference, like the eye and the match. I didn’t think this would be as noticeable as it was when you put the books side by side. In addition, the lines in the apple symbol seemed a bit thicker to me than the lines for the eye and match. But overall, I was happy with the work I had done with the alignment of the text and symbols in the grid, and the way the colors looked all together.
Credits
I got my symbols from The Noun Project website, and cited them here:
Apple — Created by Mello
Match — Created by Thomas Bruck and Olim
Closed Eye — Created by Alina Oleynik
Open Eye — Created by Victor Vorobyev
Person — Created by alvianwijaya
Thanks for reading!
