Visual Skills: Judge a Book by it's Cover

                 

• The book I will be designing a cover for is "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" by Lawrence Weschler.
• I chose the book specifically as I really like the title and the potential it provides from a creative point of view.
• I personally find the original cover to be rather dull and a product of its time.

• I approached this brief by using 3 methods of ideas generation; a mind map, a list of things to consider when developing my roughs and bullet points of interesting words and phrases from the blurb and the photographs within the text.

• Elements to consider include: composition and framing, line quality, colour palette,
themes communicated, simplicity, shape, working with type and process.

Pinterest Board:

• I created a Pinterest board to provide me with some quick inspiration while discovering my own

methods of communicating visually the themes of my book.

• Immediately, I noticed a trend of recent books encapsulating themes of antiquity, nostalgia, early-mid 20th century design,
simplicity, vintage-ness, a reworking of classic book covers from the past.

Folio Society:

• These are some of my favourite covers when visiting the Folio Society website.

• What works about them? The use of a limited colour palette (usually 3 colours) and the cleverness of using negative space and simple shapes to communicate characters and themes within the book.

• Having no text on the cover works really nicely too, attracting focus to just the illustrations and imagery alone. I cannot apply

this to my own work, however, as the brief calls for the title and author to be part of the cover design.

Initial Sketches:

• I took some of the imagery from the book and iterated illustrative ideas in various different ways.

• From previous briefs, I have found that constantly remaking pictures allows for deeper investigation 

and approaches to better understand the subject matter.

• What next? Now that I have a slew of simplistic motifs, in both positive and negative form, I can begin to create some

thumbnails to consider composition and lettering in my book cover.