Project Three — Book Covers
The Fleeting Childhood Series
For this project, we were tasked with designing book covers for a three-book series. This could be a real series, a series we make up, or a collection of three books with a similar theme. The purpose of this assignment was to further develop our skills in Illustrator through an exploration of a blank canvas, and to highlight connections across distinct pieces.
For my books series, I decided to select three coming-of-age books to create a series on the topic, which was later named The Fleeting Childhood Series. The titles I chose for this series were: Kira-Kira, The Catcher in the Rye, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
The titles I chose were titles I had loved for their content, and most had been either assigned to me or through recommendation, not necessarily for their aesthetics. Their actual covers are vague at best.
Kira-Kira
The Catcher in the Rye
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Although all these books are famous coming-of-age novels, their covers are abstract and uninviting; it’s unclear what genre or age group they might belong to.
Because coming-of-age novels are so personal to a character’s journey into adulthood, I wanted to highlight this aspect of individualism by illustrating a prominent character of the novel on the cover. The current covers’ figures were either too far away and out of focus, or not human, to feel personal, and I hoped to amend this by creating a recognizable character portrait for each novel. Each character portrait I have designed also contains a distinguishing feature of the character themselves which is included somewhere in the book. I know I always love when I’m reading a book and I read a line with the title off the book in it, so I thought I could recreate this feeling through visuals.
Color Selection
The first color palette was selected because it contained the three main colors I wanted to include: black (for Lynn’s black hair), brown (for Francie’s brown hair), and red (for Holden’s hunting cap). The next two colors were selected because I liked how they looked with everything.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — Process
The distinguishing characteristic of my cover figure is her braid wrapped around her head. In the book, the full head braid is how Francie passes for 16 years old in order to get a job to support her family at 14.
Between critique sessions, I was told that my title font was too large and child-like, which conflicted with the mature terms of growth that my novels tackled. By making these titles white and choosing a cleaner font, I was able to direct more attention to my illustration, which is where the strength of my cover design really lies. This font change was reflected in all titles.
For all titles, a quote by the main character that I believe reflected the character well was placed on the back cover in the final design, replacing the block-text synopsis I imagined (another change suggested during a critique). Additionally, all text was centered and titles were made white.
Kira-Kira — Process
For this novel, I chose to have the sister of the main character, rather than the main character herself, on the cover, since she was the main force that moved the story forwards. Her defining characteristic was that she was diagnosed with cancer, so I chose to emphasize this by making her skin paper-white instead of a healthy color, as well as by drawing her in a hospital gown.
My initial defining-characteristic feature for this title was to have the character balancing books on the top of her head. In the novel, the sister balancing books on her head is one of the few times where she’s seen having fun, imagining a fun life as an adult, and overall being a teenager before she is bedridden. However, this limited my space available for the author and title text severely, and would look too different from my A Tree Grows in Brooklyn cover, so I decided against this design.
Along with font issues (this cover’s font was smaller than my other two novels), feedback from mid-critique made me aware of the discontinuity in spine coloring I was creating. My other two spines contained a lot of green coloring, so this spine’s blue coloring would stand out. I amended this by ultimately changing the background spine color to white with green text to maintain continuity through the color green.
The pattern on the hospital gown in the second checkpoint image was extended to the spine to make the spines a bit more interesting. In order to maintain continuity, a pattern was added to all characters’ shirts and then extended as a line on the spine.
The Catcher in the Rye — Process
Similarly to Kira-Kira, my ideas for this cover changed feedback about continuity. I originally thought I would draw Holden wearing his red hunting cap as his defining characteristic, but instead decided to highlight his grey hair at age 16. This decision allowed me to explore more with overlapping colors, as was successfully experimented with with my two other covers.
My initial color selection for this overlapping effect was poorly defined. By making my grey selections lighter, and making the background color grey as well, I was able to make these grey tones pop more and create a more dimensional look.
Final Thoughts
I’m extremely happy with the end result, but could not have possibly gotten here without honest critiques along the way. Not included in this compilation are the book covers I handed in during final critiques, which had leading and continuity issues (the pattern design on the back cover was not present in all versions). My critiques during that session were all based on those small issues, which have since been fixed.
