FMP (BA): Front Book Cover - Digital Design Process

Making Adjustments

I scanned everything in and made adjustments. This process didn't take long at all as I have gotten so used to doing it, and once everything was done I put them all together on the same document and began to put everything in place. I had taken note that the quill was too close to the book so I shifted it upwards using both the lasso tool and transform tool.

Fixing the Type

With that done I decided to edit "Quotes" in Illustrator because the inconsistency with the white gaps was really affecting the whole design and made it look slightly messy. Using the Pen tool I started to draw the white gaps again - having redone the inking and filling in the gaps before scanning it into Illustrator.

I didn't want to spend too long doing this so most of the white gaps were inaccurate, as I just wanted the general idea. I wasn't too sure about this though so I added in some white diamonds to see if that would improve it. 

I still wasn't too sure so I had a look back at my inspirations (which is displayed in a separate post here) and I was influenced by one of the designs "Romeo and Juliet". I really liked the way they had a diamond in the closed counters of their letters and that they only included the full shape of the diamond on some of their letters.

In the end I decided to do this in Photoshop as I found myself wanting to correct my letters and becoming too focused on making it appear as digital as possible. I want my design to have those little hints that it has been hand-rendered. I had to shift the letters apart slightly because the diamonds made them really close together.

Once done I added in a drop shadow affect by simply duplicating it and making it a darker colour. I then duplicated it again and made it white to create a sort of light effect... This was inspired by my Moby Dick piece as I really liked the shading to it, and it's also quite similar to the "Romeo and Juliet" piece that I'm heavily inspired by.

With the type done I could now drop it into my main illustration, and I made it a bit smaller as I found that it was too close to the edge.

Trying Out Some Shading

Here I experimented with adding some depth to the piece by creating some rough areas of shading and lighting. Once again, I just wanted a general feel of it as I wasn't too sure of whether it would actually work or not. I used Gaussian Blur a couple of times to soften the shading a little bit.

I wasn't too keen on this shading idea so I just deleted it and went back to focusing on the colour palette and type.


Playing Around with the Lineart Layer

I made my colour palette very light so that I could mainly concentrate on the line work and the typography. I had the idea that the swirls could overlap the type at some places, so I created a new layer and placed it beneath the line art and then painted it in white. I had to make sure that the lineart layer and this new layer were above the type layer in order for it to work... An alternative method was to duplicate this and then erase the areas where the type and swirls overlapped.

I had the idea of separating my swirls from the banner, book and quill so that when it comes to the painting stage it'll make it easier for when I make them different colours to introduce some depth. To do this I simply duplicated the line art layer and used the eraser to delete all of the swirls.

With them separated I made the swirls a lighter grey to everything else. This is what I had so far:

Colour Scheme - Light

Now I am ready to add a colour scheme, and after having a browse on Google (which you can also see from my inspirations post) I found the perfect colour scheme for this. I was going to make the swirls gold, the type black, and then everything else in a soft grey.

I then wanted to add a faded vignette to bring out the illustration off the page slightly and soften the overall appearance as the type was quite dark. I realised that with this gradient/vignette the banner and the book weren't white, so on a new layer I used the brush tool and filled them in with white. This also made them stand out and become less like lines but more as objects.

Colour Scheme - Dark

I was interested to see what my design would look with a dark colour scheme but still having some gold elements, so I just created a new group and began to rearrange things so that they were in their separate folders. In the end I had three folders; "vers 1" was dark, "vers 2" was light and then I had my original lineart.
I made some adjustments in terms of shading as it needed to be a little darker.

My Two Versions

In the end I had two versions:

Feedback

I was a bit stuck in terms of deciding between the two so I asked my fellow classmates and lecturers to see what they thought about them. I did this by just asking them to put a tick next to their preferred version.

Even though most of my classmates placed ticks I did manage to gather one or two comments from some of them. Here were the following comments:

J: The dark version looks a bit too dark and gloomy for a book cover.
E: If I was looking at a book of quotes... I wouldn't want to see a blank book. Maybe you could add some little scribbles on the book illustration? The lines show up well on the darker version though.
R: Do you need to create a spine?
K: The quill shows up a lot more on the lighter version

Taking all of this into consideration I shall be using my lighter version. I was initially going to go with the dark but from the feedback I have picked up on things I didn't notice before: that a lot of my designs were already dark; the lines of the quill aren't as visible; and that the dark version didn't have that "soft" appearance.


More Adjustments

I went back onto Photoshop and one of the first things I did was to add some scribbles on the book using the Pencil tool. I made it gold so that it could create the effect that the swirls came from the gold writing.
To do this I just drew some scribbles on one of the pages and then duplicated it to the other, and used the warp tool to make as if they were bending with the pages. Then I used Gaussian Blur to soften the lines slightly.

My next step was to get rid of how the swirl overlapped the text, so I just took off the fill and placed the swirl layer behind the text layer.

I realised that I had missed off a diamond on the U so I quickly started to work on the U. I find that the thin stroke was a bit out of place in comparison to the other letterforms so I deleted this half of the U, copy and pasted the other half, then reflected it. This time the stroke was consistent. I then shifted the letters out a bit as the kerning was getting a bit too tight because of the diamond.

I then added in my drop shadow effect before dropping it into the main illustration.

While I was doing a bit of research on binding processes I realised that the book cover in one of the tutorials was slightly larger than the inside pages. I quickly drew up a sketch of my new dimensions before applying them to my piece.
As the template had used different sizes I just made my front cover one centimetre larger on each side.

One of my classmates mentioned that I should probably display "FTweekend presents" or something that includes FTweekend right at the top as it is quite important, and then have "designed by Liz J Owen" on the back cover. I have decided that instead of doing it as "FTweekend presents", I would just include their logo at the bottom corner of the page.

I got the logo from here.

This is how it looks now:

I wasn't too keen on this so I tried out various formats for the logo. Here are all of the ones I came up with (including the one above):

Out of all of these I think that the third and last one are the strongest designs, because the logo doesn't disappear into the detailed illustration and neither does it demand one's attention. I do find that I often look at it when I observe the cover so I might make it - whichever one I choose - have a light grey box rather than white.

I think that before I do that I shall ask for feedback from my classmates. Here were their comments:

S: "The third one :)"
K: "Wow! No wonder you're stuck! I'm baffled! Although the [second] one I'm leaning against as although it's not obvious it doesn't mess with the design. The others messed with the design I think, unless you're having this design in the book too."


Reflective and Critical Thinking - A Summary

I am very pleased with how this design turned out and at how much it changed over the weeks of designing it. I am glad that I did try out doing new sketches as I wasn't that satisfied with my previous design (which you can see here).

I have managed to create a balance between elegance and friendly. Even though I did use serifs in the end to mimic the serifs used on the Oxford Literary Festival website, I made sure that they weren't too dominant in order to soften their appearance.
The "Quotes" on the other hand contrasts strongly with my smaller type because it is slightly more decorative and has more of a dominant appearance because the serifs are thicker and more obvious. Even though it is very "strong" with it's thick strokes, it isn't intimidating and is quite similar to the type I have used in some of my inside designs.

This is why I feel that this book cover has a much stronger connection to my designs than my previous one; it was all through the choice of type and colour scheme. I have used a monotone palette and restricted myself to using no more than three colours, which is very similar to what I have done before. The two typefaces here are very similar to some of my pieces (e.g. Moby Dick) which not only made the design process a lot easier, but it felt that the front cover was just another hand-lettering piece of a quote. It belonged with my other pages.

There are a few things that I want to experiment a bit more such as overlapping the swirls with some more swirls to act as some form of shading, but I think I shall leave that for now until I have more time at the end after tweaking my other designs a bit more.

My only worry is that I don't have enough time now to create some more quotes but at least I can fully concentrate on perfecting what I have. I hope to do the back cover quite quickly so that I could then move onto producing prototypes and test prints.


Learning Outcomes:

[5] Developed skills of independent study, resource utilisation, problem-solving and decision-taking.

[6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.

[7] Developed their ability to learn through reflection on practice and experience.
[9] Developed their ability to work with complex material, analyse problems and identify appropriate solutions.