Exercise 10: Conceptual cover design

Look at the book covers shown and try to work backwards from the image to the thought processes of the art director or designer.  You'll need to familiarise yourself with the book's contents to be able to do this properly so research the storylines on the we.

The Honeymoon’s Over – Andrea Chapen and Sally Wofford-Girand

Amazon Book Description

Freelance editor Chapin and literary agent Wofford-Girand gather essays by 21 women writers who dish about their troubled marriages. The suicide of her violent ex-husband renders Debra Magpie Earling gun-shy of future romances, and Lee Montgomery contemplates infidelity on a flirtatious ski weekend with her former college boyfriend while her trusting husband of 20 years is off visiting his ill father. Elissa Minor Rust's commitment to her husband is unwavering despite her break from the Mormon Church that once was their union's bedrock; an unplanned pregnancy threatens Annie Echols's marriage; and Daniela Kuper battles a religious guru for child custody. Although candid and heartfelt, many of these essays are unpolished, rambling and poorly edited, like Zelda Lockhart's saga of coming into her own as a lesbian and a mother. Another low is Terry McMillan's vulgar rant about an ex-husband, who admitted to homosexual exploits on national television.

The two best pieces are self-knowing, gutsy and carefully crafted: Joyce Maynard confesses how her earlier infidelity nibbled away at a lonely marriage that abruptly ended when her husband slept with the babysitter while she was away caring for her dying mother; and Ann Hood proves that a loving marriage can miraculously survive a child's death.

Comment

I like this cover as it says to me that once the first happy, absorbing period in a ‘marriage’ has faded into a distant memory and affection for a partner goes you are left with someone who is not prepared to move the earth for you and what you get are things the other end of the spectrum like burnt toast.  

It would be fairly easy to obtain the props for this cover once the initial design was agreed with the art director and the main decision would probably be how much to burn the toast.

Missing Men: A Memoir – Joyce Johnson

Amazon Book Description

Joyce Johnson captures the hunger to replay life's moments -- painful and joyous both, over and over like a song, as she put it -- to feel what they have meant, to hear them right, to savor and take them inside you and somehow keep living them long after they're gone.  She shares the scary lack of fulfilling resolution when the little enlightenments don't simply add up to resolution and love. She doesn't hide her fear of dying alone, and that's something so few writers have the courage or ability to really share.

Comment

I find this cover gives the idea of a person alone.  Whilst the bed has been slept in (observed by the wrinkles in the sheet and indentation on the pillow) the fact that the bed is empty makes me feel that this side of the bed is often empty. i wonder if the colour of the bedding is significant to the whole design?  

It would fairly easy to obtain the props for this image as beds and bedding are fairly easy to obtain.  The lighting seems to come from the right hand side, indicating perhaps that there was a window on that side.

Nova – James Boice

Amazon Book Description

Grayson Donald, seventeen years old, has just hanged himself from a basketball hoop next to a playground in Centreville, North Virginia (NoVA). The question is Why? In this incisive dissection of the author's hometown, James Boice scratches its shiny suburban surface to reveal a place formed from "a cloud that slid west and met with the humidity and spent buckshot cartridges and Civil War bones clad in blue and grey to create concrete and vinyl siding and front yards laid in chunks, child care centres and video rental places."

James Boice blends sharp social observations with dark humour and remarkable prose. In both passing glimpses and intimate interior monologues, we come to know Grayson's family, his fellow students, his neighbors, and many who knew him only slightly, if at all. A portrait of a town emerges that renders Grayson's suicide both devastating and inevitable. NoVA is a unique and fascinating depiction of the American suburb.

Comment

I find this cover confusing, as it’s actually an inverted image (see Exercise 9 – Choosing Imagery).  I had to take a long look at it to see what was included in the design – that of a white picket fence with the sun shining behind it. Why the designer has chosen to invert the fence and place it at the top of the image is confusing. To me the ‘white picket fence’ epitomizes the image of white middle class Americans living in the suburbs of a town where all is serene and hunky dory.  Do we take it that all is not what it seems and life is a turmoil of contradictions?  I don’t get that from the cover at all.

I would imagine that the picture of the picket fence with the sun shining through it would be sourced from an image library (could be through Google) and a royalty paid. This would save a lot of hassle commissioning a photographer or artist to create a new image.  As this type of picture has often been used to depict the American suburbs I would imagine there would be many similar images available through well known image libraries.

A General Theory of Love – Thomas Lewis

Amazon Book Description

Drawing comparisons to the most eloquent science writing of our day, three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. The result is an original, lucid, at times moving account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well being. 

A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.

Comment

This cover is very emotive to me.  Placing two chairs in the centre of an empty room, with a very bland background, signifies togetherness. Tilting one chair against the other gives a sense of reliance of one chair on the other and I feel it indicates the tilted chair needs the other to survive.  Togetherness is taken further by linking the two together.

If you were the commissioning art director you would need to find a suitable building with windows either side of a long hall.  The chairs would be fairly simple to source, any second hand shop would be able to provide an identical pair of chairs.

The Opposite House – Helen Oyeyemi

Amazon Book Description

Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women. Growing up in London, Maja, a singer, always struggled to negotiate her Afro-Cuban background with her physical home. Yemaya is a Santeria emissary who lives in a mysterious somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. She is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them. Interweaving these two tales. Helen Oyeyemi spins a dazzling tale about faith, identity, and self-discovery. 

Comment

I find this cover confusing as, reading the Book Description above you read that the whole story is about one house with two significant doorways giving access to two very different places on different continents.  Whilst a door is prominent on the bottom right hand corner there is nothing to show its real significance.  

Would it be difficult to reproduce? I think this picture is an artist's impression, therefore to produce it would be fairly simple, just commission someone who is good at drawing/painting people.

Presence – Arthur Miller

Amazon Book Description

This book is an unforgettable collection of a master storyteller’s final works. In Presence, a posthumous gathering of his last published stories; he reveals the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that characterized his great dramatic works. The six stories included here have all appeared in major publications and each displays all the confidence of an artist in his autumnal prime. Presence is a gift that all fans of Miller’s work, as well as readers of contemporary fiction, will applaud.

Comment

The hazy grey cover supports the idea that the author of the book is no longer with us (a euphemism for someone who has died).  The ghostly person in the middle distance also supports this idea.  The whole cover is very simple with very little to distract your eye from the author’s name and the title of the book. It’s about as basic a book cover that you could get.

As to commissioning this cover, I would think if you didn't have an image of the author then you would need to either find a suitable picture of someone in an image library or commission a photographer to take some pictures of a man in the studio and create the whole image using Photoshop to merge the two together and add the text.

Exercise 9 continued

Exercise 9: Choosing your imagery

For each of the following categories write around 100 words describing why you think the publishers adopted this particular design route for the book.

I did some research on the display of books in my local W H Smith bookstore and was allowed to take some pictures, see below:

An out-of-focus photograph – Shades of Murder by Ann Granger

Amazon Book Description:

In 1889 Cora Oakley died by inhaling a poisonous gas in her sleep, and her husband William was put on trial for her murder. Over a hundred years later, the only remaining members of the family are two elderly sisters who live in the ancestral home. Unable to maintain the mansion, the sisters decide to sell up and live off the proceeds. Then a young Polish man named Jan appears, claiming to be William Oakley's great-grandson and threatening to ruin the sisters' plans. When he is found dead, it seems that the shadow of murder has returned to haunt the Oakley family again, and Superintendent Markby must look back at the events of a century ago to find the killer... 

 

Comment:

This frontispiece captures the whole sinister look of a murder mystery story.  The colours blue and black, used in the picture, depict deep dark secrets whilst the out of focus picture of the mansion house give it a mysterious look.  The inclusion of shadows on the drive leads the eye into the picture and up the drive to the house where all the action takes place, both past and present.  The serif type font allows the eye to follow the words along more easily although it’s generally advised to use a sans serif font for headings; it has been ignored here quite effectively.  The gold/yellow colour (the opposite of blue in the colour spectrum) of the author’s name and book title make it stand out sufficiently well to catch the eye where it would be placed in a shelf of a bookstore.

An inverted photograph

I’ve found it difficult getting to grips with this category as there are many different definitions of ‘inverted’ if you go to Google and ask to define the word you get the following:

Inverted, past participle, past tense of in·vert (Verb)

Verb:     Put upside down or in the opposite position, order, or arrangement.

Modify (a phrase) by reversing the direction of pitch changes.

If you take it further then with Free Online Dictionary you get:

in·vert  (in-vûrt)

v. in·vert·ed, in·vert·ing, in·verts

1. To turn inside out or upside down: invert an hourglass.

2. To reverse the position, order, or condition of:

Working on the above definitions and checking other student blogs I have come up with the book below.

An inverted photograph - The Poseidon Adventure

Book Description:

A relaxing Christmas cruise soon turns into a tragic accident as the luxury ocean liner, SS Poseidon, capsizes under a colossal tidal wave, and the passengers on board suddenly find themselves struggling for survival. A group of fifteen passengers face daunting obstacles, challenges and dangers, as well as a string of personal crises, in a fearsome race to escape the capsized ship. In a timescale of just ten hours, they face a life-changing physical and emotional battle forever changing the people they had once been. This extraordinary novel captures the true essence of human courage and spirit in a gripping fight for survival.

Comment:

After all my confusion about the type of picture to use I came up with this upside down ship which is depicted as floating upside down as it sinks slowly down to the depths of the ocean.

It is coloured blue which is understandable as the ship is sinking and our immediate thought of the colour of the sea is mid blue not the green/blue that is the real colour.  The ship in the picture is slightly out of focus, which is understandable, as it’s as if you’re looking at it from under the sea yourself.

The white coloured sans serif for the title and author’s name also links in with the bleached colour that items become with a lack of sunlight.

An historical archival photograph, but not depicting the subject precisely

C J Sansom, Dominion

Book Description

1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled; the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. There are terrible rumours too about what is happening in the basement of the German Embassy at Senate House. Defiance, though, is growing.

In Britain, Winston Churchill's Resistance organization is increasingly a thorn in the government's side. And in a Birmingham mental hospital an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle forever. Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given the mission by them to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country. Before long he, together with a disparate group of Resistance activists, will find themselves fugitives in the midst of London's Great Smog; as David's wife Sarah finds herself drawn into a world more terrifying than she ever could have imagined. And hard on their heels is Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer Gunther Hoth, brilliant, implacable hunter of men . . . At once a vivid, haunting reimagining of 1950s Britain, a gripping, humane spy thriller and a poignant love story, with DOMINION C. J. Sansom once again asserts himself as the master of the historical novel.  

Comment:

My feeling with this book cover is one of a timeless city of London during the 1950s. The book is set in that era where Germany had invaded England but England continues in more or less the same way as if they had never won invaded.

The misty background with people in period costume and period settings give the impression of the 1950s whilst the red sans serif font title (I don’t think a Bold font has been used) is rather understated as is the personality of the British persona thought to be throughout the world. 

A still life close-up – A Hunger So Wild, Sylvia Day

Book Description

Elijah Reynolds is the most dominant of lycans, a rare Alpha whose skill for the hunt is surpassed only by his primal sexuality. When the lycans revolt against the iron fist of angelic rule, he steps in to command, becoming both enemy and coveted ally in the conflict between vampires and angels. Vashti is the second most powerful vampire in the world, a lethal beauty with a path of devastation in her wake.

Tasked with proposing an alliance between vampires and the lycans who killed her mate, Vash approaches Elijah, whose need to avenge the loss of his closest friend calls for Vash's death even as his passion demands her surrender. Soon, their enmity erodes beneath an all-consuming desire. Elijah has never encountered a woman whose warrior spirit and fierce sexual appetite rivals his own, while Vash is faced with the one man strong enough to be her equal. But as war looms, each must decide where their loyalty lies - with their own kind or with the enemy lover they can no longer live without...

Comment:

I’ve read the blub above and am having trouble trying to work out what the cherries represent.  The image itself is very well done with the deep saturated red, perhaps to represent blood as this book is about wars between vampires and lycans (?).  The black background and black and grey shadows allow the shapes of the cherries to stand out well.  In fact, the whole image has been desaturated except the cherries to make the emphasis fall on them.  The fonts are sans serif and in red to make them standout strongly.

I’ve not read this book but have read two of the three ‘Twilight’ books that are about vampires and werewolves as the heart of the story, and those books have a strong black and red themed front cover.

A minimalist landscape or outdoor scene with a large area of sky

The Breaker, Minette Walters

Book Description:

Twelve hours after Kate Sumner's brutally murdered body washes up on the beach, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is found wandering the streets alone. At first, the prime suspect is a young actor, obsessed with pornography. But now the local English constable has doubts about the victim's husband. Was he really out of town when
she was killed? And why does the child scream every time her father comes near her? Did Kate have affairs with other men while married to her husband, and, if so, did he know?

Comment:

This front cover is fairly obvious as the murdered woman was found washed up on a beach amongst the breaking waves.  The colour scheme is one that would be found on and around the water’s edge so fairly predictable.  The font for both the author’s name and the title is a serif style (something like Times New Roman (Windows) or Georgia (Mac).  I assume that the author’s name is in yellow/gold to make it less obvious than the title which is in white.  Again, I’m pretty sure that Bold hasn’t been used for either section.

Exercise 9: Choosing your imagery

I'm enjoying finding book titles to link to the type of frontispieces in the proscribed list apart from the category 'an inverted photograph'.  I've checked the definition of inverted to make sure that I'm correct in my understanding of it.  The Free Dictionary gives the following definition:

"in·vert  (n-vûrt)

v. in·vert·ed, in·vert·ing, in·verts v.tr.

1. To turn inside out or upside down: invert an hourglass.

2. To reverse the position, order, or condition of: invert the subject and predicate of a sentence.

If I type the word in to Google Images I just get pictures of items turned upside down so I take it that's what is expected.

I've gone to the blogs of other people on this module and exercise and it would seem that I have to find book covers where the image is just upside down.  The problem is that the titles of the books they use don't have the word 'inverted' in the title so it looks like a long hunt through Amazon/Smith's to find something suitable.  I was in Smith's the other day and was allowed to take pictures of the current top 50 but, whilst there were several examples to cover the other categories, inverted seemed to be missing.  I had to convince the shop assistant that I was genuine by showing my OCA student card and NUS card, then she felt she had to take guidance from above, but as I'd already talked to her about this project she convinced 'them above' that it was okay so I was allowed to continue.

Top 50 books in Smith's last week

This week I was back scribbling down book titles to cover the other categories.  Unfortuneately I only had the back of my shopping list to write on.

Reverse Side

The only one missing any suggestions is Inverted photograph, plenty of suggestions for the others.

Front side

So, back to the drawing board for the final title. Perhaps I'll email PH, my tutor, for advice?

I love Typography

I stumbled upon the links page for this module and have been working my way through the various items. I heartedly agree with the suggestions for successful typography as too many different fonts just confuse the eye when reading text.  

The other area which I haven't found any the links is how important colour is to the reader.  I'ts always been emphasised to avoid colours like yellow, cyan and green as the eye finds it difficult to pick out the words on the page.  Whilst it might be construed as boring, there's nothing wrong with black on white or blue on white to get the reader to stay with you.  

Here's the link for OCA enrolled students to read the article 'I Love Typography' on the OCA website:


http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/04/on-choosing-type/

Exercise 8: Experiment with layouts

Version 1
Experiment with different typefaces and with the use of italics and bold, to produce three different versions of the layout below.

Here's the basic layout with the heading in Arial, Bold, font size 48 pt, centred; Body text is 2 columns, Times New Roman, font size 11 pt, single line spacing; picture on left hand side full length and half width.

Version 2

Here's Version 2 with the heading in Arial, Bold Italics, font size 48 pt, centred over the right hand side ; Body text is one column, Georgia, font size 10 pt, fully justified, single line spacing; again the picture is on left hand side full length and half width.

Version 3

Version 3 has the heading in American Typewriter Bold font size 48 pt, centred over whole page; the body text is American Typewriter font again in size 10 pt, Italics and 2 columns with the picture on the right hand side.  

Version 3 is my favourite layout but for general items in magazines and newspapers /newsletters I prefer to keep to the conventional Arial/Times New Roman set up as it is easier for the reader to follow along the lines.  Too many gimmicks within the typing line makes it difficult to follow and the reader could well lose interest and turn the page.

Interestingly I had a problem inserting images into this post as when I saved the above images as .psd files they wouldn't upload  I had to go back and SaveAs .jpg files for them to be available.  I've had a discussion with my new tutor about file formats, preferring to use .jpgs rather than .psd files as they are not usable other than in Photoshop. My preferred file type if I want to keep the layers is the TIFF format as these are usable anywhere whereas you can only use Photoshop files in Photoshop!   

Exercise 7: Applying a drop shadow

Moving on with the typography lesson I was asked to add a drop shadow to the heading using the Blur / Gaussian Blur setting, see below:

I followed the instructions given in the text but I normally would have added a drop shadow using the Blend palette to make any changes.

Here you can make several changes at once.

Exercise 6: Getting started

This was a fairly simple start point in using text in Photoshop. I had to make a new Photoshop file, size A5, and manipulate text using the Character / Paragraph floating palette.

Text details can be found in the blue box at the bottom of the page.  This simple exercise was followed by making changes to the heading and selecting text by using the mouse. I noticed that there is no mention of using the keyboard shortcuts which can be found when you open the menus at the top of the page or by hovering over the Tool palette and the shortcut letters will appear.  I have worked hard to memorise these shortcuts as I find it easier to use Command/letter than move to the mouse and lose my place on the keyboard.

Fairly basic manipulations required here, again details of changes in the blue box.