Project Four: Shape & Color
Project Four involved using shape and color to create covers for a book trilogy. I chose to create covers for an existing book trilogy by Isabel Allende which I read in middle school.
Description: Young adult trilogy about adventure and magical realism originally written in Spanish and translated to English. Follows the adventures of two teenagers, Nadia and Alex in the wilderness on three different continents.
Author: Isabel Allende
Titles:
Book 1: La Ciudad de las Bestias (City of the Beasts)
Book 2: El Reino del Dragón de Oro (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon)
Book 3: El Bosque de los Pigmeos (Forest of the Pygmies)
Notes: The trilogy is sometimes referred to as Memorias del Águila y del Jaguar in Spanish. While the trilogy name has been translated to English, I have most commonly heard it referred to by the name of the first book.
All three books have distinctive animals and vividly described colors to draw imagery from. These ideas inspired me to pick this trilogy to design covers for.
Preliminary Sketches
In my preliminary sketches, I tested out a variety of cover designs. I knew I wanted to play with texture and using a laser cutter to create cutouts in the covers but I wasn’t sure which elements I wanted to cut out. I wanted to stay away from the color gradients, fantastical typefaces, and quotes ending in ellipses in the original covers but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to balance shapes and text in my designs.
After working out some different ideas for the trilogy design, I settled on the direction shown in the fifth iteration. I found three books from the library with interestingly textured goldish covers and would like to incorporate cutouts into the actual book covers in my design. Because of this, I feel that the simpler cover designs would be a better direction to go.
In my first digital iterations I played with which colors to use and where the cutout should go. After focusing so much on the shapes and colors I ran into a bit of a wall until I was advised to focus more on the typeography.
Making the type a more prominent part of the design and using color as a background for each book rather than accents on a dark color helped my book series fit the magical realism theme. I realized that I wanted to include both the Spanish and English titles of the books on the front cover with the Spanish title being slightly more important since the books were originally written in Spanish.
However I still struggled with arranging the type in a way that was consistent across all three books yet worked for the different lengths of each title. I also struggled with figuring out how to incorporate the cutout imagery without making it too big. I had settled on Garamond for my typeface but I tried out different combinations of bold and italics as well as different sizes as I refined the typography.
In the final versions, I standardized the format of the titles for all three books and shrank the eagle and jaguar images. I changed the color of the first book to match the jewel tones of the other two and experimented with different versions of the front cutouts for the third book before settling on a shape comprised of circles to match the geometric character of the other two covers.
I wanted to create a cover that would showcase the textures of the book inside without verging into tacky by trying to create a artificially feeling of being old and worn. I was pleased with how the cutouts accomplished this goal.
Another major change I made going into my final iterations was to add quotes to the back cover of the books when I shrank the eagle and jaguar cutouts. I picked quotes that I felt conveyed a major theme or question for for the characters in each book.
I felt that the cutouts were very successful in amplifying the interaction between the book and the cover and in conveying the idea that everything is more than it appears from the outside. Given more time for the project I might have played more with the settings of the laser cutter and the paper type to achieve a more nuanced interaction between book cover and jacket.
