Project Four Documentation
Cover Design for a Book Series
I chose to create a series of my own, three books about adventures on the ocean: Life of Pi, The Old Man and the Sea, and Moby Dick. These three books talk about human and nature, and man’s fate and life through the human characters’ adventure on the ocean with the interaction with an animal.
I decided earlier on in my initial sketches that I want to use the distinctive relationships of the two types of characters, the human and the animal, along with the condition of the sea to portray the atmosphere of each book. I explored different ways to depict the water and one of the sketches show different points of view of looking at the ocean. I decided to push further this idea which led to the first digital iteration.
Some of the feedbacks I got for this version were that the typeface was a bit hard to read, and the transition of the front view of the water into the top view with the window on the front was not smooth. However, I was able to step into the next iterations with the same elements that I used here, such as the condition of the ocean and the two symbols for each book that I drew.
For the final design, I focused on depicting the sea level and showing the relationship between the man character and the animal. I used watercolor to paint the lines representing the water and used the pen tool to draw the symbols for each book. I located each set of symbols according to the plot and their relationships. I chose a traditional serif font to convey that these are more of a classic reading rather than a children’s novel-type of book. On the back cover, I also tried to continue keeping elements minimal, choosing just a short quote from each book so that I could arrange them in a similar way. Overall, I think I tried to narrow down what I wanted to focus on, and to keep the alignments and placements calm and minimal, pulling the eyes towards the ocean first than the symbols, then the words.
