Kennedy Design 254

Final Book Covers!

These are my final covers - I really like the concept, however if I had a bit more time I would try and hunt down a real typewriter for the title and author, I would try and include hand drawn maps in the background, and I would comp them onto real books.

Book Cover Series Process

I decided to do my book covers on the theme of 'journey' using the books below:

After picking these books, I looked at various Penguin book covers including the book 'Penguin by Design' to see how they layout their book cover designs, where their logo is placed and the bar code, etc.

I then thought about using maps for the background of the book covers to emphasize the idea of a journey.

I also considered doing illustrations depicting scenes from each of the books.

But then, I saw the movie 'UP' last week in celebration of finishing the portfolio review and in their ending credits they use a scrapbooking motif to show the places they went and I thought that would work well for the theme of my three books!

I've been fascinated with the photo quality that holga cameras produce and hope to try one out this summer, so I found some holga pictures on flickr showing landscapes from scenes in each of the three books and applied these photos to an old polaroid picture I had.

I altered the penguin logo so that it would match the background of my book covers.

I used the typeface Adler to get a typewritter effect - I wish I had access to a real typewriter because I think it would have given the covers a more authentic feel. I then tore the paper and scanned it into photoshop where I applied a duotone that complemented the background color/texture of my book covers.

Dinner Invitation Process

Here are some of the preliminary layouts for my design. The typography on the menu and the biographies was difficult to work out. I wanted to interlace their obituaries with my memories of them. Initially, I had the obituaries in blue and my memories in yellow, however for the final design I swapped these two colors and it was easier to read what I wrote with the obituaries in the background. I also increased the point size for both and used text wrap so that it would flow better with the shape of the circle. I moved the text in the menu so on the right hand side they were all left justified and on the left hand side it was right justified.

Dinner Invitation Process

I had initially thought I would use black as my background color, but it seemed a bit stark, so I decided to go with a royal blue color along with yellow. I added a blue transparency over each of the images to unify them. However, I felt like the oval shapes weren't working and the whole invitation was feeling a bit 'scrapbooky' with the stars in the background and the oval images.

Dinner Invitation Process

I decided to change the color scheme and use color photographs. In order to differentiate between each of the quadrants I sampled a pale yellow from the photograph of my grandmother (Maye) and then added this color to the stars so they didn't compete with the typography as much. I changed the blue to be a bit more of a navy and used a pale blue for one of the quadrant colors.
I decided to use a blender pen to transfer the photographs onto the invitation. That was my favorite part of making this invitation - I loved the aesthetic quality that gave the images! Below are the images before I transferred them.
It was difficult to fold the entire system together and get the edges to match up properly. I bone folded each of the creases first and then I cut out the circle covers and used brads to attach them to the main part of the invitation. Fortunately the back of the brads are flat enough to not protrude too much in the back. I then used the two-sided tac paper to adhere the front and back of the invitation.