OUGD503 - Penguin Book Cover Design Development

Penguin Book Cover Design Development:

For the design of my cover I had decided that the media I wanted to use was photography. This is because it would allow for the realest design possible. I would give the real texture of the plaster and also all of the detail that is present in a persons hands. Above are all of the photographs which I took for the cover design. I experimented with the positioning of the fingers. I tried the positioning of the fingers closed and then also the hands more open. I decided that the photograph was more aesthetically pleasing when the hands were open and it also allowed for the plasters to be more on display which were the main element in the photograph that needed to be visible. As the book is the other way round to how racism actually happened in history. I needed the hands to be white and the plasters to be black. This is because the plasters would only be tailored to the hands of black people as they are the superior race in this story. Black plasters don't actually exist so I was going to have to edit the picture in order for the plaster to be the colour I needed it to be. 

The image above shows the edited picture of the hands. I isolated the plaster and changed it into black first but tried to leave a little bit of texture. As the colour black is not actually accurate to skin colour I thought that the image would be more effective if it were to all be in black and white. I therefore changed the whole image after making the plaster darker. I was very happy with how the image turned out as it looks exactly how I was hoping. I think that the use of this image leaves some room for imagination as the reader would not understand the relevance of the imagery on the front cover until reading the book or finding out some information about the author and her background. 

Once I had created the image I started to develop the cover adding in the typography. I experimented with a few different typefaces but I decided to use the combination of both a serif type and a san serif type. This is because the story is based on the history of racism but has put a modern/alternative twist on the way in which it happened. The use of both serif and san serif text therefore is representative of the story as the serif is a more old fashioned design of typography representing the history within the story but the san serif type is representative of the modern/alternative spin. The serif typeface is Big Caslon Medium and the san serif typeface is Sinhala Sangam MN. These typefaces complimented each other well. The writing for the title of the book fitted underneath the hand with the cross on and the blurb fitted inside the hand on the back cover. I kept the original colour of the penguin to add a small amount of colour to the book cover. It also allowed for the penguin to stand out more rather than blend into the cover so that someone looking at the book would automatically know that it was a penguin book cover design.