1 down, 4 to go.
My final book jacket design. After all my versions, I decided that a dark photo represented the dark theme and tone of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I used Baskerville, Chaparral Pro, and a font I got online called Bitter, all serif fonts. I kept the red type, but in a different way. Using effects on InDesign, I was able to make it look like Grimm’s Fairy Tales was cut out of my cut outs, with red paper underneath. It strengthened the relationship between the title and the image. I used my photographs of paper for the entire jacket to keep it consistent. I designed this jacket for a modern crowd who might not think of reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales otherwise.
An interesting read.
I thought this article from Smashing Magazine was interesting and relative to myself and the Publication Design course. When I first started the GDMA program, I didn’t really have respect for type and definitely none for paragraph setting. When I did essays in high school, I’d type it up and hit the “Justified” button to make it took neat and organized. Now, I really do find type and letterforms beautiful. I also look at paragraphs differently. Large indents and too many hyphens have become pet peeves of mine. It’s actually quite relaxing fixing the leading in paragraphs, line by line.
“Good typography does justice to your words, and good wording does justice to your ideas.” Probably my favourite line from the article. Although, one of the comments made me smile. “Justification of text is a strict no no by any design standard unless typography is intended to denote any graphical form. It is almost like murdering of design principles.” I feel bad for every time I ever pushed the justified button on word.
As I complete my book jacket design for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it’s kinda fun to see where I went to come to the final design. I made many drafts with varying photos and typography. This photo just shows most of my drafts, from the early stages to nearing the final stages (upper left to bottom right).
In the beginning, I struggled mainly with finding an image which was both visually appealing and fitting for Grimm’s. I loved the red type, but wasn’t sure what kind of effect or colour the photo should be. If I chose a photo that I couldn’t use red type with, is it still as strong? Do I sacrifice the red type or do I sacrifice having the flexibility to choose the photo I want?
After I choose the look of the photo, I needed to sort out what the typography would look like. So far, I had the same typography that I had since the beginning: old, gothic type combined with a serif font. I also added in some decorative lines. However, after getting feedback, it seemed that the type and photo wasn’t cohesive. This was a tougher problem for me to solve than the photo. I needed to find type that was modern, yet fitting for Grimm’s. It was tough, and very annoying. In the end, I learned that for book covers you need to do two things: capture attention and represent the book’s content in a flash. These two things are the things that always need to guide book cover design. I got through my little obstacles by asking myself what is best for the book content and for catching people’s eyes.
For designing a book jacket for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I’m taking a modern approach. For the image for the cover, I decided to cut out paper, layer them with foam core, take a photograph, and edit with Photoshop. The photo you see is the same photo edited differently. At this stage, I still don’t have a pin point vision of what I want the colours and type to look like, I’ve just got my image, and my variations of editing. I need to choose the image that looks the best, looks the most interesting, and looks to fit Grimm’s. Hopefully my time-consuming and tedious approach works well. I’ve never done anything like this (using cut outs for design purposes) so it was interesting to plan it out and see how hard it was actually doing it. Surprisingly, it wasn’t very hard, it was just took awhile. It was nice doing something hands-on instead of just sitting in front of a computer. I like how the photo turned out. Now I’ve got to figure all the rest out!
Awesome, interesting, interactive book covers!
These are book covers by Jim Tierney for four books written by Jules Verne. I really liked how each cover was interesting, and a couple were interactive. The illustrations are also great. Each cover did a really good job of reflecting the content of the book, and had great detail. These covers inspired me to try to include some sort of interactive feature in my book cover design.
This is our team’s newspaper redesign. We chose to redesign the WE newspaper because of its lack of organization, consistency, and personality. Also, the website was terrible. We redesigned the newspaper cover, feature spread, classifieds, and website. Our focus with our redesign was making it clean, modern, trendy, and consistent. We also focused a lot of our effort towards making the newspaper brand and personality strong. Unique typography, a limited colour palette, and eye-catching photos were all strong components of our design.
Featured in this post is each page of the newspaper redesign, as well as the website redesign.
Another set of beautiful book covers.
Another set of great book covers, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith; she is the senior cover designer at Penguin Books. They are all classic books written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I thought that these book covers were really eye-catching because of the special foil printing and the patterns. They also look great together as a complete collection, which might be because of the target market. They are probably targeting book collectors who love the classic books already with this high-end book cover design. I was wondering if the patterns were chosen based on the contents of the book, or if it was just for aesthetics.
When we were assigned Project 3, a book cover redesign, I thought of doing something inspired by these covers. Because the project is for a collection of the Grimm Brother’s stories, I thought of taking icons from the stories and incorporating them into a pattern. I wanted to have a similar target audience as the Fitzgerald book collection: book collectors who don’t mind paying a high price for a unique, high quality, well-designed book cover.
Obama newspaper covers.
Here’s a quick link to a huge variety of newspaper covers that were released when Obama was nominated for the 2008 election.
Its very interesting to see the range of headlines and photographs that were used, and how they were used. I thought that some photos were very impacting, while some were boring. Another thing I found made the photos more eye-catching, was the size. Whenever the photo took up the whole page or the majority of it, the paper cover looked much more appealing to me. If the photo was smaller, I didn’t want to read it as much. That is probably because of my characteristics; I don’t read newspapers or keep in touch with global news daily. So, I think some newspaper covers which feature effective headlines and a smaller, but good, photo would appeal to a different audience more so than the all-photo covers. There are even a few papers that choose to focus on Obama with his wife or with his family, which gives it a different impression. Instead of showing a more political focus, perhaps it is more of an emotional appeal.
On a funny note, the link also show one paper, Rocky Mountain News, who apparently didn’t feature Obama’s nomination at all. Instead, it shows a photo of an empty highway with the headline reading “I-25 ghost highway.” I wonder which story American readers will choose.
Award-winning newspapers.
Found this blog post and thought it was interesting and relevant, seeing as how we are redesigning newspapers in class. The ones I found particularly inspiring are El Economista, Hartford Courant, and Politiken.
In El Economista, I liked the illustrations and how they partnered with the text. In the cover, there are many elements, such as the side bar, the graph, the main feature article, and all the subsidiary articles. I love how they are all organized so that there is hierarchy and that it looks clean and easy-to-read, even though there are many features.
In Politiken, I also liked how the illustrations and graphics commented the text. I also liked how the ads do not take away from the integrity of the newspaper and its contents.
For Hartford Courant, the main things that grabbed my attention for the cover were the dynamic and centred headings, the lovely organization of the body text (from one column, justified to four columns, centred), and all of the white space. The next page of the newspaper we’ve seen before in class. The body text and illustration looks great, even though it sacrificed readability. Again, generous white space making the newspaper look top-notch and eye-catching.
