Breaking down the book cover.

This is the design for my final design, I want to talk through each part of the design and why i have made these decisions. 

(I still haven't yet decided on the background colour choice as I want to base some of my favourite outs and show them to my target audience to see there reactions! I also need to still consider the type to make it perfect, which includes experimentation with the front page title font.)

I have been on the Penguin website and looked at the guide lines again.. to make sure that I am clear on what is need and what the guidelines say to involve. I have downloaded the template that my design has to fit to from the Penguin website. I have made sure that my design for my cover works well with the template and doesn't overlap the bleed.

I have made my design very central, mostly all of the elements to the cover is ranged centre, illustration and text. This all makes the design correspond from front, spine to back. I want the centre to to be the focus point, but I have broken that trend in one point of the design in the wolf hand illustration. I have done this purposely because again the hand is coming out of the middle spine of the book but spreading across to the front cover, scraping down the right side of the design. I found this to be pleasing to the eye, as the middle illustration draws you in and the hand going down the right lead you eye down to the title of the book, it reads well down the page! 

I have decided on my final design, the illustration on the front which lead me to draw my second of the wolfs hand scraping down the page. The style of the book cover links well with the illustrations, I have used the mediums ink and water colour overlapped, I found this technique most successful. I found that the background colours where to blank so I decided to explore textures that i could again overlap, these where of a scratched up wall, by adding this to the design I was able to make it have a multi toned effect which worked better against the illustrations. 

With the spine of the book i have desided to go for a simple design, I have used the boday text that I have been using through out the book cover design which is Myrid Pro. I used this font for both the author and the title, but i felt that the spine needed a little detail! So i thought back to my ink testing, by chance i have made some ink splats with my finger then i drew ears on them. This created some hand rendered fun little rabbit heads, I had put this rabbit splat on my back cover for detailing, so I thought it would correspond if I put it on tot the spine in-between the author and the title. 

I felt like something extra should be on the back cover of the book to break up the design more to make the layout more interesting. I wanted to make all the text on the text on the cover the same (Myriad Pro,) exploring font size to show hierarchy. I have painted the books title in watercolour, with the original thought that i could put it on the front. I tried this out but the hole front cover looked too busy, so I tried it out on the back at the top of the page. This worked well, I felt like it brought some of the medium used on the front for the illustrations on to the back.