Book Cover Inspiration Research

In class we are getting ready to design a cover for an anthology of short stories that Junior High School kids wrote.  I scanned award-winning designs from Communication Arts at the Parkland library and took pictures of both regular young adult books and young adult short story anthologies.

Communication Arts Illustration Annual 52 May-June 2011 Scans-I use these for style inspiration.

These illustrations are from books.  The left group is from Front Forty Profiles Series No. 1 Mark McGinnis, an art book. I enjoyed the extreme contrast with the picture of the birds between the black and blue.  The illustrations on the right are from Bugs by the Numbers by Sharon Werner and Sarah Forss. The type treatment with 2500 is an inspiration to me, it is comprised entirely of small bugs yet it is very readable.

This is from page 80 and 81.  The left side illustrates a poster for Girl Scouts to show a really strong and empowered girl.  I want to glean some ideas from this type treatment.  On the right is a set of illustrations for American Songbook, "Skylark," "Mr. Bojangles" and "Come Rain or Come Shine."

This illustration is cover art for "Rocky passages, Broken Promises," which is about Malibu-based drug and alcohol rehab centers, the owners and their stories.  I have been paying attention to the new surrealism that is out there in design and I often wonder how I can incorporate it into my own work.

These illustrations are from a booklet by Justin Reneria about the names of animals.  I enjoy the style of these drawings.


Jane Addams Book Cover Inspiration Research-I took pictures of these book covers at Jane Addams in Champaign to get an idea of what book covers for young adult literature (both short story anthologies and regular fiction) look like these days.  I apologize for the poor quality of the photographs...I didn't want to say too long at Jane Addams taking pictures and get kicked out.

 

I love the texture in this book, although the type, while it fits, is definitely subordinate to the imagery.

 This book caught my eye because it is colorful and the type treatment is well done.

This book is very much the modern design for typical epic tales young adults are into these days.  The type is also very nicely done and adds to it.  However, as you can see with this research it was difficult to find book covers that use type AS the design rather than just a supplement to the design.  I have more thinking to do!

Homework 3-Inspiration Layouts

Below are two layouts of the content I randomly found on the web, based on layouts I found in the book (The Elements of Graphic Design by Alex W. White).

Layout 1:

This layout is a response to the layout on the top left of page 62.  It is an example of a 1400s-1800s "broadsheet," a poster sharing news or events.  I don't know if anyone would get from this that it is supposed to harken to an old fashioned layout, but with the futuristic picture it did not seem right to use old fashioned fonts.  I decided to go with what felt right with the content.  Also, the original has three columns and with the lack of words using three columns looked really strange, so I used two.  Even then I used four paragraphs instead of one to fill the page.  Completing this layout was a good exercise in adding columns, adjusting column widths, balancing ragged edges and taking out hyphenation. 

Layout 2:

This layout is a response to the layout on the bottom right of page 67, which is a webpage that is selling clothing.  There are pants "floating" in a lot of white space on the left and text on the right to sell the product.  I tried adjusting the picture to give it as much white space as the pants but it looked strange with a block of text since it itself is boxy, so I decided to directly align "box to box."  Here again I used all paragraphs instead of one because otherwise there was way too much wasted space.  I feel this layout is not as successful as the last.  This exercise did help me get my feet wet a little in layout design though, which is something I need help with.  That in itself makes this exercise a success.

Both layouts were from pages not specified in the original assignment...I think maybe because my book is a different version than in the syllabus (the full book, not the small one) the pages might be off.  However, I made sure to select layouts from the "timeline chapter," which was specified in the assignment.  Pictorial content came from https://www.photospin.com/browse_photos.asp and was in the category Industry.  I chose the fourth picture on the right.  Text content came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_Rumi and then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahram_Nazeri to fill the page.

1st post in 2012...

This is a test. The picture above has nothing to do with my assignments. It's cool though, isn't it?  This is my first blog post for GDS 172 and I needed to see that Blogger would work on my new computer. Thank goodness it does!  On my old computer it would not allow me to post images.