Do judge a book by its cover - Visual skills (final design)

Final design

final cover (hand made)

This is my final hand drawn design. Overall I'm pleased with how it looks. I intended to colour in slightly looser way and create the outlines in a quicker and more gestural way. I think its because when it comes to the final design I automatically work neater and take longer crafting my image. I like the colours and I think I balanced them well across my image. I also spent more time applying colour to small details which I think has been beneficial. The icons on either side work well and I managed to keep a consistent line quality on it all.

I was going to find some appropriate text and light box it onto my design. But I decided to scan my image in and work on it digitally. I usually don't like to scan a hand made image, I feel it takes away some quality. But I figured it was needed for a book cover so I could try out different type and also so I could have a printed version to rap around the book.

A major issue I had when scanning in my drawing was that it was too long for the scanners. This meant I had to scan in two halves and line it up on photo shop. This was not as easy as I thought because of the complex lines. I had to use a faded eraser and zoom right in to blend them together, which worked well and cannot be noticed in my final.

Traditional text worked well my design. I liked how it was simple and didn't take attention away from the drawing. But I decided a serif typeface was a tiny bit too complex and would look better in sans-serif.

final cover (digital)

I used a magic eraser tool too make the background solid white. This made my design much better and looked more like a real book cover. I feel that the simple text and library number make my design look professional, and enhances the imagery.

One thing that annoyed me about my final printed cover was how the colours where slightly darker and less vibrant than the hand drawn. I think this is because I altered the colour levels a tiny bit, I should have only altered the levels of the black and left the colour the same. One thing that I feel works well in my design is the pattern on the spine and how that character stretches across the back and front. I think this is the key thing that makes my design interesting. Im really glad I took a more experimental and imaginative approach to this brief, I think it has payed off and has taught me to be more confident in that side of my work. Using reference imagery in an un-direct way helped me think of unique ways of interpreting things into my designs. A different approach to this brief could have been looking a lot deeper into native american mythology and making designs that communicated different tales from there folk law. Or studying more items and objects from native history and turning them into icons and symbols like I did on the inside folds, and coming up with minimal designs based around them.