Penguin Book Covers

Weeks 4, 5, 6 and 7

This brief comes from a penguin books design competition to redesign some book covers. We have been asked to do two of the three covers provided by penguin over a four week period.

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

This is an adult non-fiction book written over the course of a year in an autistic boys life about his relationship with nature, struggles with bullying and severe anxiety and a passion for wildlife conservation. 

Research and Inspiration

I started off by reading parts of the book and reviews, anything to get a feel for the content. I took down some notes of themes and also the different animals/plants mentioned. I already had an idea of what I wanted to do but it took me a while through thumbnailing to get to where I wanted it to be.

Process

I started off making myself some thumbnails to scale, I worked across the full back, spine and front to avoid anything feeling disjointed and I eventually knew I wanted the design to wrap the full way around. The next thing I did was figure out a pleasing layout for the title since it has to be there so why not start there. Once I had that, I just used my handwriting font as a placeholder and made up some more thumbnails ready for some illustration. As I mentioned earlier I had an idea in my head it just took a little while to get it onto the screen. I started to experiment with a ripped paper - scrapbook - type style and again using my handwriting font as a placeholder (although it doesn't look bad) I sort of mocked up the look I'm aiming for. 

I wanted to have a look at some different styles of wildlife illustration because I like the paper textures and the colours I have going on but I think I want a sort of field notes, scientific drawing sort of style to it. Not sure yet, and that's why I need to have a good look. 

I really love the simple animal sketches so I'm going to try out doing some like that but since I want to incorporate the orange I'll have to figure out how to do that. I also found this beautiful blue and orange colour palette so I'm going to have a go changing the green to blue since that was my plan in the first place but I changed my mind because I thought green made more sense. I wanted to include blue as a subtle nod to the authors autism as blue is the colour chosen to represent it so I would really like to be able to have that in there - I also like the darker end of the blues on the palette so that's what I think I'll focus on. 

Once I decided on a font I went ahead and drew up the wildlife - I decided to incorporate the orange with semi-transparent circles overlapping each other and the illustrations. I really love how they look on the sheet on their own but I did have some doubts about how it would all come together. Below is the 'finished' version and I do like it but its very busy so I'm leaving it alone for now and since I finished it so fast I started to put together another one which is also below and again isn't finished. 

Both of them need adjusting and lining up and a fair bit of tweaking but I actually much prefer the frog one. I'll see both of them through to completion but thanks for the frog idea Dwayne. Also - I made my own font for frog one and I think it looks pretty cute. 

I went back on both covers and made sure things were lined up and looking good, the more diary looking one looked great all lined up with the grid, the blue one I used less of a grid but still kept everything within the lines I set and payed attention to spacing more than I did with the first time around and even cut out some of the animal illustrations to make it look less crowded. 

Outcomes

Girl, Woman, Other by ​Bernardine Evaristo

This book is a confusing web of stories following 12 women and their lives, relationships, identities and careers. I love the concept but man is it hard to get your head around. I did try though.

Research and Inspiration

I first put together a list of the characters and reading from a summary I jotted down their important notes that define them in this story, at this point I really had no idea where to go from here. My initial idea was to have an illustration of 12 items that could represent each character and have them intertwined somehow but I'm not sure if that's going to work now. 

Process

Above is a rough crack at what I'm trying to do. I'm happy with the text placement which means the knot and ropes will have to move to work around it. Still not sure what I'm going to do about fonts and colours so that's next on the list.

I made a pattern inspired by traditional African fabrics for the background, it was initially more pale tan tones because I wanted it to be quite subtle in the background but it looked strange to I managed to boost it up to a more saturated orangey colour. I used blues for the text and illustration to contrast the orange. 

Outcomes