Cheese Monkeys Cover

The Cheese Monkeys Cover A Novel in two Weeks of my Semester

By Margot Stevens

Chapter 1 A Background Check Before I even began working on the project, I first read the book. I checked it out from the library because audio books are abhorrent.

Needless to say, it was a very interesting read. I flew through it. The plot line and Chip Kidd’s humor and sarcasm made the book very interesting and engaging, if not slightly psychologically disturbing.

When I was done reading the book, I wrote a paragraph on the imagery that I liked most and on what the tone of the book was. This would help me later when deciding what tone I wanted my book cover to convey.

Tone: The beginning half of the book is very innocent and light. However, the second half is very dark and chaotic.

There is a vein of sarcasm and cynicism that runs through the entire book. Chip has a unique sense of humor and word choice that is very engaging and entertaining there is also a lot of negative connotation used. (Snot colored walls, negative view of people.)

Imagery: There is a lot of bizarre imagery and bizarre situations that come up. For example, art teacher squirting that poor cat, Himillsy, Chip, and Winter wasted at the bar, Baby Laveen- especially in his Christmas getup, Chip exploring Winter’s house, Winter’s strange board game masterpiece, Art projects in flames, students stranded at the side of the road, Maybelle riding a motorcycle into class, Himillsy shooting the professor, Himillsy’s fish project, Chip and Maybelle delirious without sleep, good is dead and industrial imagery, Winter’s box of $h!*, the frat house, and more.

Chapter 2 Things Get Sketchy

After reading the book, I began to sketch out different cover ideas. I tried to include the front, back, and spine while sketching so I could get a complete view of what I could do with my idea.

I also picked apart different areas of the covers. That way I could have variations of the same idea and I didn’t have to draw out the entire cover again just to change a small detail.

Chapter 3 Survival of the fittest After sketching out 20-30 sketches, I chose my top three sketches and roughly laid them out on the computer.

This was pretty fun because I was visiting a college friend while doing this and I was judged hard for throwing a monkey on the ground and photographing it. Especially because every time the toy hit the ground it would scream for about ten seconds.

I could already tell that the fetus sketch was my favorite.

I felt the book had a balance between innocence and naivetĂŠ in the beginning, and chaos and darkness at the end and I tried to convey that through the light and dark halves of the book cover.

I also felt the stuffed baby fetus that Himillsy adores in the book not only plays an important role in the story, but also accurately portrays the bizarreness of the book. I added a red ball cap for a little Himillsy touch and as an entrance point into the cover.

I also wanted to play with negative space which led me to make the black and white halves of the baby.

Chapter 4 The First Test

Once the rough computer sketches were done, the class had a critique. The goal was to help choose which of the three options was the strongest. The class could also give advice on how to improve the cover and discussed whether it actually conveyed the tone the student was aiming for.

The class unanimously agreed that the black and white fetus cover was my strongest.

This was partly because the monkey cover looked like it was attracting an audience of twelve-year-old girls and nobody could really tell what the smoke stack was until I told them.

That aside, they also felt the fetus conveyed the tone the best.

They gave me some advice like play with sizes more which was no surprise and with that I headed back to the computer lab.

Chapter 5 From Fetus to Boy

I thus began [improving?] my cover.

I had been told to play with sizes but what I had heard was increase the sizes. So I did. And boy did I. Consequently, my book cover went from an underdeveloped, prenatal sketch to the loud, obnoxious, in-your-face attitude of a prepubescent middle school boy who doesn’t know what personal space is.

Not my proudest moment.

At this point I also added in the content of the back cover.

Which didn’t help the cramped conditions.

Chapter 6 The Second Test

The second critique mostly went along the lines of, “Jesus, shrink everything. Ahhh.”

Got it.

Chapter 7 From Boy to Man

I took my rebellious teenager and whipped some self-respect into him. The title shrank, the baby shrank, the quotes on the back cover shrank, the title on the spine shrank, its inflated ego shrank.

My cover grew up and began to look like a self-respecting adult.

I played with fonts to add some font variety and decided to add in more red to tie in the hat and add more visual interest. Things were looking up.

Chapter 8 Blitzkritique

We had a third critique, but this was more the professor quickly going from title to title listing off things that could still be improved.

I received general praise for the improvements I had made. Additional advice included adding a barcode at the bottom, italicizing quote attributions, and shrinking “Good is Dead.�

Chapter 9 The Inside Matters

Now I had to move on to part 2 of the project- designing the inside matter of the book.

The words and content were already given to us, we just had to arrange it in an interesting and effective way.

My first attempt was not hugely successful since I didn’t have the right number of pages.

I basically went through the list of pages that we needed, and forgot the blank pages in between. But that was sorted out the first time my professor took a look at my computer.

He also told me to shrink some fonts again (seems to be a chronic problem I have), change up the design I had for my table of contents, and switch the Table of Contents heading to the other side of the page- all things that were easily done.

Chapter 10

Things Start to get interesting

After a little informal critique, I make the second rendition. I even printed out the booklet so that I could physically see what the pages look like and mark it up.

I added in blank pages, enlarged “Fall Semester,” shrank “Chapter 1” and the copyrighter information, changed a font weight, and increased leading in the table of contents, among other minor changes.

Chapter 11 All’s Well that Ends Well

In the end, the project turned out like so:

Chapter 12 Looking Back

After reading the book, my concept was solidly some sort of bizarre light and dark theme.

I felt that accurately summed up the style of the book.

Pretty early into the sketches I came up with the fetus idea. Though I kept coming up with more ideas, I kept coming back to the baby as my strongest sketch. It was very clearly inspired by the tone of the book as well as objects from the book.

I wasn’t quite sure how I would draw a baby fetus on the computer since all imagery had to be 100% original. But that was going to be a problem for a later time.

I found that while doing the project, printing out the pages helped a lot in critiquing myself. It’s a lot easier to see how the spine looks without the visual distraction of the front and back covers next to it on the document. The same went for the inside matter. It was good to experience how each page looked while steadily flipping through them instead of just scanning them on the computer screen.

I can also say that eliminating all traces of white space

doesn’t work. When I made the overcrowded design it was pretty clear what the problem was. I now understand the value of white space on an entirely new level.

The one thing I can say for the giant design is that I had been partly attempting to use the Fibonacci sequence. The goal was to come in at the hat, travel around the back, and end up at the author. However, for the sake of visual ease, that idea was abandoned for a more symmetric arrangement.

If I had more time, I might fiddle around with a more dynamic arrangement. I feel like the cover I have is very effective, but I think I would like to push it a little more. Of course now that the project is due in a couple days, I get struck by another wave of inspiration (the cover of this PDF being one of the ideas I had- it certainly uses the Fibonacci sequence better.)

I think I need to challenge myself to push my designs more. Possibly choose more expressive fonts or dynamic sizes and layouts. I have a tendency to heavily grid everything and use only one or two rather generic fonts. All of that has its

place, but now is my opportunity to experiment with different styles to find which work in which situations.

I do like how this project was challenging and pushed me to try some things I wouldn’t normally try. I’m mostly thinking of drawing a baby fetus. That was a good problem solving exercise. Especially since I didn’t just want to draw a baby, but a modified, more circular one than usually seen in real life. I’m pretty satisfied with my results though I know there is room for improvement.

There wasn’t much I didn’t like about this project. I was pretty much on board from the beginning. There were a couple deadlines that were a little frustrating since they came right after fall break so it meant a late night trying to finish everything I hadn’t had a chance to do earlier. But besides these minor time management glitches, I really enjoyed this project.

After reading Cheese Monkeys, I really want to look into Chip Kidd more. Any mind that can come up with a story line like that one is one I need to get to know.