BOOK COVERS HANNAH FORSE S2955092
CONTENTS Process work
3-13
Flat nets
14-17
Digital mockups
18-22
Photos
23-29
Manifesto
31-32
PROCESS WORK
The process of designing my book covers initially began with me designing covers for Gyllian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”, “Dark Places” and “Sharp Objects” which I planned to produce as a set. I designed two covers, one for “Gone Girl” and one for “Dark Places”, and then decided to scrap the whole idea as I couldn’t think of anything to create for “Sharp Objects” and felt that the designs looked very half-hearted and carelessly designed. I also didn’t feel very passionate about the covers after a while and so I decided to change my idea completely and design book covers for another set of books.
I started off my second process by drawing a very rough sketch of an idea for a book cover of the Japanese animated film, “Spirited Away”. Because I thought the sketch had great potential in becoming a refined design and could inspire my other two book covers, I decided to design three Japanese anime based books for “Spirited Away”, “Attack on Titan” and “Durarara!”, all of which are either manga’s, Japanese novels or Japanese TV Shows and films. I decided to do this because I love each of the titles I chose to design for and felt that I would have a greater opportunity to produce more stylised, bright and vibrant book covers that would fit in more with my own personal art style
After drawing a rough sketch of my idea for “Spirited Away� I drew up each illustrated element that I wanted to include on separate pages. This included a drawing of a character from the book and an illustration of some grass surrounded by butterflies. I then scanned in the drawings before darkening them on Photoshop and colouring them with the paint bucket tool. I then vectorised them in illustrator before transferring them back into Photoshop and placing the separate elements together on a blank page. After that I created a new layer and designed a background that I made into an illustration of the sky covered in clouds. This was used to create a thematic colour scheme across all three of the book covers I designed. Each illustration was also designed to be very stylised to suit the cartoon elements of anime.
The logo of spirited away was based off of the fairy tale theme that the movie follows. I did this to work the typography in with the spirits, witches and supernatural creatures that feature in it and created it with the other end of a pencil dipped in ink as I had no nibs at the time. I really liked how it turned out as the pencil aided me with creating a slanted nib effect so I scanned it in to my laptop and vectorised it in illustrator before editing its size and thickness in Photoshop. I then placed it on top of the illustrations I had created and added the authors name just below it in a typeface titled “Rex Bold”. I also used this font to add the title to the spine of the book and to add a defining quote to the top of the blurb. The rest of the blurb was then added to the back of the book in a font titled “Myriad Pro” as “Rex Bold” is a capital font and didn’t look good as a smaller paragraph. I then used tracking, kerning and alignment to adjust the blurb until it appeared balanced and legible and fit in well with the rest of the design.
After finalising my design for “Spirited Away” I began to create my book cover for “Attack on Titan”. Again, as I did for “Spirited Away” I started this process by drawing an illustration of a feature from the TV show and scanning it into my laptop to be edited on Photoshop. I then coloured it with the paint bucket tool and edited its size and a few errors that I hadn’t seen on the physical copy. I then vectorised the image in illustrator before creating a sky background that mirrored the one featured on the “Spirited Away” cover. Once again, the illustration was very stylised and cartoonish to suit an anime art style.
After adding the illustrations onto a net of my book cover I began to create the title’s logo. I initially thought that I would design a large serif typeface but then decided that a hand painted design would look a lot better. I began this second process through painting each letter with a thick and rough paintbrush, splattering additional drops of paint around each letter to create a coarse appearance. I then scanned the logo and adjusted its sizing, alignment and placement in Photoshop until it was ready to be vectorised in Illustrator. The logo was painted to appear thick and uneven to fit in with the rough and gritty theme of the show and to produce an unclean and unrefined image that would support the book’s concept and blurb. Again, I created the spine of the book using the font “Rex Bold” to further add a theme to the set of book covers. The blurb was also designed in the same way as it was for “Spirited Away”, using the same font and editing of tracking, kerning and alignment.
The third book cover I designed was for the Japanese anime and novel, “Durarara!�. As I did for the other two books, I began my process by drawing out an illustration that would form the bottom of both the front and back cover of the book. The illustration consisted of a city scape to match the anime’s setting and featured a character from the show subtly within the buildings. I then scanned in the illustration and coloured it with the paint bucket before vectorising it in Illustrator. After I had put all the elements together and created the sky background in Photoshop I realised that the sky and buildings were a lot brighter and more vibrant than the illustrations in the other two books which disrupted the thematic quality slightly. Following this, I lowered the opacity of my designs to dull the colours down before adding them to my book net.
The logo of Durarara! was created in a style that would add to the city setting of the show and the novel. To do this, I drew out a graffiti illustration of the title and edited it after scanning it into Photoshop and vectorising it in Illustrator. I had to remove a few lines from the image using the selection tool and the eraser as it was slightly rough and unrefined. After it was finalised I added it to my illustrations and added the spine and the blurb using the same fonts and placement as the other two books. I also added a drop shadow effect to the logo to make it appear as if it was sprayed onto a building. This further added to the city setting.
After finalising my book cover nets i edited them slightly to make sure that the emphasis was on m typography work as opposed to my illustrations. These edits included shrinking down the size of the text within the spines of my books, making the titles of the books larger and lowering the illustrations so that they didn’t intrude upon the main focus. These edits can be seen below.
FLAT NETS
DIGITAL MOCKUPS
PHOTOS
MANIFESTO
When designing my book covers I took into account a The typeface I designed for my second book, “Attack on range of different design choices that allowed me to end Titan”, was designed to appear rough, unrefined and up with a final and well thought out result. uneven to produce a gritty, muddy and violent imagery much like that of the content of the show. I did this I decided to design book covers for the anime TV through the use of a thick and broken paintbrush with shows and films “Spirited Away”, “Attack on Titan” uneven bristles which I used to paint each letter of the and “Durarara!” as they allowed me to create designs logo individually. The logo was then splattered with paint that were stylized, vibrant and interesting, much like to add the illusion of mud and dirt covering the page. The that of the anime art style. As well as this, I was able typeface was also very stylised and cartoonish to draw to design something that I could incorporate my own personal art style into which opened up a whole range of comparisons to the anime style of the show the book cover was designed for. opportunities for me to create my book covers with.
from the back cover, with its surroundings as the only illustration as not to distract from the blurb. For “Spirited Away”, the front cover featured a character from a movie standing in grass covered in butterflies, with the grass and butterflies carrying onto the back cover. “Attack on Titan” featured an illustration of the walls featured in the TV show that are used to keep the characters safe from giants outside of the city. The wall illustration was carried onto the back cover in absence of the gate that was drawn in the centre of the front cover. Finally, “Durarara!” featured an illustration of a city scape with a subtle drawing of a character from the TV show hidden within For my third book, “Durarara!”, I decided to design a The main colours I used for each of my books were light the buildings. The city image carries onto the back cover blue and white. This created a thematic colour scheme graffiti style logo that would work in conjunction with the without the character in it. throughout the whole set of my designs through the use TV show’s setting of the city of Ikebukuro, Tokyo. In the of an illustration of the sky, which I used as a background show, the city is decorated with graffiti and gang culture, for each of my book covers. I also used colours such as which I decided to incorporate into the logo. I did this through drawing out the logo, scanning it and editing it black, grey and green to carry on a theme across the whole set of designs. These colours were used in a very on Photoshop before vectorising it in Illustrator. Again, cartoonish style which was derived from the anime art the logo was designed to appear like that of a cartoon to fit within its anime genre. style of the genre of books I was designing for. For the spine on each of the books, I used a font titled The typography I designed for my first book, “Spirited “Rex Bold”. This was because it was bold, prominent and Away”, was drawn with ink and made use of flowing, attention grabbing and would stand out on a shelf of organic and natural lines. The typeface was designed books. I also used this font for the title quote of the blurb to be cursive and dainty to fit in with the fairy tale theme of the movie. As the movie features spiritual and on the back of each book and for the author’s names, supernatural creatures such as dragons, spirits, witches which I placed on the top of the front covers to allow the and monsters, I felt that a cursive and classic “fairy tale typography and illustrations to be the central focus. font” that curved across the whole front page would work well as it looks similar to that of the writing in magic and spell books seen in fairy tale based art forms in popular culture.
Each illustration on the front of my book covers was derived from an element of the show or movie it was from. I also ensured that there was one element that stood out in the centre of each front cover but was absent