Shape & Color: Covering A Series of Unfortunate Events
Book Covers, Print / Illustration, 2018, Individual
About the Project
This was the fourth project for a university communication design course. The goal was to create covers for three books as part of a series, and to create or highlight a strong connection across them using common design elements, while making each one distinctive. The assignment dealt with issues of hierarchy and expression related to typography, color, and space, and balancing form and function. The same color palette of 3–4 hues plus black and/or white had to be used across the 3 covers, no more than 2 type families could be used, and the three books had to have the same height and width. At the end, the covers were printed in color, trimmed, folded, and displayed on books.
Project Process
Background
The book series I chose for this project were the first three books in the childrens’ book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, written by Lemony Snicket. The titles are The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window. The original book covers contained detailed, ornate illustrations done in a Victorian Gothic style on the front, with a long letter from the author on the back (written in the style of the book). Since there have been a few recent adaptations of the series on film and television (a current ongoing Netflix series), I wanted to update the book covers in a modern, simplified, and appealing style to reflect and tie in with the series’ modern ‘revivals’ on screen, and thus present the series in a more updated and relevant way, while still preserving elements of its original and unique style.
Sketches
My initial sketches aimed to be simple, mostly black and white to reflect the intentionally ‘dark’ style of the book. A different splash of color would be used for each book, and each book would have its own simple illustration. The spine would be kept simple and modern looking, while the back would contain some kind of text, presented in a streamlined way.
Digital Iterations
As I transferred my sketches to digital iterations, I realized I wanted to imbue my designs with a sense of movement, to reflect the book main characters’ long journey throughout various places (the series contains 13 books). I created this initially by creating a ‘path’ for each book, though initial feedback from my instructor pointed out that the books lacked connection as a series. I then worked on connecting each design and unifying the books as a series, by figuring out placement and layout. I decided I liked the imagery of the titles ‘falling’ or ‘cascading’ down, and picked out distinguishing phrases from the letters found on the original back covers of the books, to cascade down as well. I kept the spine as simple white text on black, as I thought it gave the series a modern, dramatic feel when you looked at them all together from the side.
After placement, I struggled with how to incorporate illustration and color. Since I had found a good layout, I decided to work on that and create a good base aesthetic and build from there:
I then began to create my illustrations. For each book, I chose a simple, slightly abstract illustration and placed it in the background of the book covers, to give it sort of a decorative effect. Fire/smoke for the first book, a winding snake for the second, and a crooked window for the third, with a different color for each book. I liked the aesthetic, but after receiving feedback, I realized it was too unreadable and overwhelming with everything overlaid and text that was hard to read.
Below, I focused on separating all my elements to display in better and more effective form, and on simplifying the design. For each book, I decided to only display a small illustration on the back cover, to sort of hint at the content within, and sort of reflect the mysterious nature of the books (‘clues’ from each story that reflected how the characters would discover clues about their lives along their journey). I thought it might have been a nice way to link the books as a series as well, since if you eventually laid all the books with the back facing up, you would see a series of illustrations that identified each book / step of the journey.
For the front cover, I streamlined the design down to the text, and used the common text for each book to create imagery of a path or of movement. Each book’s front cover layout was the same, but I incorporated the use of color to distinguish them. By choosing to add color to the words ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’, I was able to more effectively use color in my designs by fleshing out each book’s color into a gradient — the text remained distinctive for each book but still tied together as a series. I went back to my original layout of the text ‘cascading down’ the cover, and also developed the gradient from light to dark for each color theme, shown below.
Final Iteration
