Exercise: Book Cover Design

The brief for this task was to research the works of HG Wells and create 3 book covers that would be displayed in a set. My first task was to research his work, I googled some of his most popular work, I chose to go with: The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit and The War of the Worlds. What I then did was brainstorm the key parts of the story and the key ideas. The War of the Worlds featured

themes of, free will, Fate, and Imperialism. The Wonderful Vist has themes of mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England, whereas the Time Machine has themes of Entropy.

War of the Worlds: I've never read the Time Machine so I briefly read the synopsis of the book, the book is about Time Travel and Morlocks. I then went and researched previous covers for The Time Machine and a lot of the covers feature cogs and clocks which is appropriate. I tried to feature the Morlocks into my work but that would require Illustration which isn't an aspect of design I want to rely heavily on upon. My first idea was to focus on the cogs which are a massive part of the story as they build up the machine and appear quite frequently on the other covers. Another part of the story I wanted to feature was the idea of time which I represented

with a clock, I tried to also couple in the idea of the fourth dimension by layering the clock 4 times on top of each other. I kept experimenting with other designs such as the hands of a clock and then mixing them with eyes of a Morlock which didn't look right as it looked like I was trying to make a nose which was not my intention. I liked the intricacy of the cogs and wanted to use that in my final pieces. An idea I experimented with was using silhouettes of one main part of the story and mixing it with a simplified image of another main part of the story. For the War of the Worlds, I wanted to create a silhouette of the Morlocks and then make a watch on top. It's a small design in my sketchbook because it was an idea that came to my mind whilst sketching ideas for the cover of The Wonderful Visit. This is the design I went with for my final pieces, this is because it gives me an opportunity to make my covers more uniform as the elements of the cover aren't inherently based on that specific book and can be transformed to resemble each of the 3 covers whilst still looking like a set. 

The Wonderful Visit: The wonderful visit is the story about an angel that visits a village in England, this angel is not a religious angel but a fantasy angel. Again I tried to use an angel on the cover but that would rely too much on illustration, instead, I chose to just focus on the wings as they represent the angel. I then came up with the idea of having a silhouette of the village where the angel landed. I then liked the idea of it and thought I could incorporate that into my other 2 designs, that's when I went back to my first mindmap and reworked the Morlocks and tried to make a silhouette out of them to experiment with this design if it can work with the 1st one then it has potential to be part of my final designs (Spoiler alert, it wins). separate elements of the story.

Another design I came up with is having a design in the corner of the page which represents the story. In The Time Traveler I was going to have cogs and in the Wonderful Visit I was going to have wings and buildings, however, after drawing them I realized that they didn't fit into a corner space, because of the angle having something like wings there didn't work because they didn't look right at an angle. So I scrapped that, I experimented with other styles, such as having a large design in the middle of the page. However what I went with was the silhouette idea, incorporating two


The War of The Worlds: The War of the Worlds was the last cover I brainstormed at this point I had a pretty solid idea about the direction I was heading, I experimented slightly with ideas but I was pretty much sold on my final idea, especially how perfect it would work with the London skyline and giant aliens. Another challenge about creating these covers was deciding on the colors to use. In my thumbnail sketches, I had a thick box on the top and then a a darker tone of that colour filling the rest of the book. For War of the Worlds, I chose green because of the 'blinding green lights', for The Time Machine I chose blue because of the eyes of the Morlocks and for The Wonderful visit I chose red because in all honesty I had seen it on another cover and it looked really nice and worked very well. So now I had my three colours I went on a website called Adobe Kuler which houses a ton of user-created colour combinations and found a really nice pastel collection which featured Blue Green and Red. I then went on photoshop, loaded in the colour combination and created darker tones to match with them.

                                                                             

This is the final set of books, as you can see I added the silhouettes of a main feature of the book, for both War of the Worlds and The Wonderful Visit they were set in a set location which meant that making a silhouette for that would be easy because it would establish where the story took place. However, for The Time Machine, I scrapped the Morlock silhouette idea in place for the cogs I initially sketched. The Morlocks wouldn't have been distinguishable once they were all black. Initially, the silhouette was just black, but that looked incredibly plain so I decided to add a stroke, for contrast I used the colour on the top panel. Each book cover also features a simplified element of the story. For War of the Worlds, it was obviously going to be the alien ships which worked nicely with the silhouette of London. For The Wonderful Visit I went with some angel wings like my initial sketches and for The Time Machine, I chose a watch. To add another element to the books that were consistent to each cover, I chose to add a white circle, it became the Aliens eye, the middle of the watch and either an abstract representation of the angels head or the moon.

All in all I'm super happy with how each of these panned out, I spent a lot longer than I should on an exercise, and even though they arent Assignment standard, I feel like they turned out really nicely.