Designing a Book Cover

I designed a book cover for my Graphic Design class this summer. The greatest thing I’ve learned while taking this class is how to begin a project: Gathering resources and doing initial research, fleshing out every concept that comes to your head, and organizing your inspiration into a logical order to act as your foundation as your create the piece. This post is all about my process, and of course I’ll show you the result, but the process is what I’m really proud of.

Research

To start, I went online to search for images that incorporated really creative typography with imagery…

Then I chose my book: Order of the Phoenix. I chose this book, because I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, but also because the words in the title really suggested imagery to me. Order and Phoenix suggest all manner of geometric typography with old-school secret societies and bird images.

Sketches

The next stage in my process was sketching and scanning images...

Mock-Ups

Based on my research and sketches, I went into Adobe Illustrator and started fleshing out three main concepts. I think starting with no limitation in my research and sketches is a great starting point, but part of refining and organizing my ideas is solidifying three simple directions. From there, I find it easier to choose one direction and be really confident in it.

These were the three mock-ups I designed...

While, I liked the second option, I felt the worn look of the illustration in the first option would work really well with the color scheme and phoenix illustration in the third option. So, I began to fuse ideas one and three.

Typography

Later, I went into Illustrator and started designing my typography. I got the lettering to look the way I wanted it to, but I was starting to think in terms of a worn, old book, and the lettering was just too crisp. So, I printed the lettering I’d done in Illustrator and traced it onto paper towel using a lit tracing board and a sharpie so my ink would bleed. The results were perfect. Once I had that “old-ink-on-cloth” look I scanned that back in and treated it in Adobe Photoshop.

Here's what my traced typography looked like...

Imagery

I wanted to use the phoenix and perched-bird illustrations I found online but I also wanted to use some of the hand-drawings I'd done incorporating the hourglass.

Visual Texture

As I began to create my composition, I realized to achieve the worn look, I was going to need a lot of visual texture. So, I got a little crazy. I printed my composition off, crumpled it, and then scanned it back in. Then I scanned in my cutting board, and crappy sketches of constellations and swooshes—basically anything I could reverse out to white and screen over the solid brown background to get a texture...

Putting it All Together

Once I had my concept, typography, and imagery I put it all together like this...

It had all the key ingredients, but it still felt too plain. Aspects of it, like the torn edges and wings on the "P" in phoenix, felt very contrived. So, I adjusted the composition and added the author's name (which I designed, printed, crumpled and rescanned for visual texture)...

and incorporated a border that I created from an old Albrecht Durer woodcut block.

Here's my final result...

What do ya think?