Thinking within the cover.

I have now decided on my main front cover image! Now my mission is to design the rest of the book cover to complement this.. I want to have the same tone/feeling front to back of my design, keeping in mind the imagery, style of illustration and the colours. Keeping in mind all these facts i i will enable myself to create some interesting outcomes now i know what direction i want to take my imagery. 

Testing out book covers and how my illustration overlaps with my watercolour prints to fit to the dimensions of the front cover.

I have used some of my favourite examples to use with my illustration to show how I want the colours to overlap with the illustration to create the colourful rabbit hole. I wanted this pattern to transfer on the back cover, I really like the way this looks, and to me this could be seen as a hole going straight though the book. This could suggest that how the patients hide in the book. After this thought, it occurred to me that the start of book you see the rabbit in the hole but when you turn over the rabbit has gone. I feel like this could relate to the storey of the book, in the fact that the transition of the front cover to the back. It would represent how the rabbit appears to be present and then not, as in the book some of the main characters escape at the end though either breaking out or dying. 

 

When illustrating this I included the hand rendered title in the original first time. I have kept it in to see how if It looked correct to include. I have the idea in my head that the text could follow the illustration in a circle, after seeing it like this I am not so sure on the look of it. I feel like the hand rendered type makes the front cover look to busy. I want all the attention on the central illustration. I want to defiantly just try the illustration with just some generic simple typefaces, I am envisioning small and thin e.g. Gil sans, maybe. I wan the whole book to ranged centre, this will give the entire element on the continuity. 

 

These experiments in particular are far from resolved. The colour palette I am using could be effective but I do not think the block colours work well as the background for the illustration; I am going to try and find a texture to overlay adding different tones.

I have involved the spine on the mock covers to start to digest how I could make it interesting, as in cases this is the first thing a person will see when buying. It is a very important part of the book and could be cleverly approached. I have dabbled with the thought that the spine could be the watercolour print stretched, showing the darker tones of the image. I liked this idea it focusing on the folding technique I used to create it when I was make the Rorschach tests.

The black spines where to bold, they stick out too much and again I don’t like the block colour. The font for the quote on the font and back for the blurb is myriad pro. The simple serif font works well with the busy illustration, by the text being quite and central it complements the image s and leads your eye down the page. I have tried to use the font ‘Gil sans’ but I found when I used it on the back for the blurb I found the ‘g’ hard to read when small.  Myriad Pro is perfect for this; it is a big possibility for the quotes and the blurb but I may pick this font in bold or a different font for the title.

I have put on the penguin cover template, so I can get a sense of where the penguin logos go on my design and the barcode on the back. Thankfully the required elements are on the cover are in the right places and so far my design doesn’t clash with anything, I will keep this in mind when designing, so the bleed where the design is cut off for when trimmed doesn’t cut of my images.