These 3 book covers are the result of a project for my year 2 graphic design class this semester. The premise was to pick one book and end up with 3 different covers for the book at the end of the project.  One cover was limited to typographic elements and could only have text in some form or another.  The next cover had to be primarily handcrafted and then scanned or photographed.  The last cover could be designed in any format the designer chose.  A list of books was provided for the designers to choose from, made up of classics that are broadly well known to most audiences so the results for any of those particular books should be fairly easily recognizable.  

The background of this project includes a beginning graphic design class and a typography class, and one project previous to this one for the current graphic design class.  This previous project included 7 creative design strategies, and we were instructed to utilize some of these in some way in our book covers.  The 7 creative strategies are: combination, juxtaposition, isolation, metaphor or simile, change of context or environment, physical shape/similarity, and material change/swap/focus.  

On the way to getting to our finished book covers, we had to make a brainstorming page, then utilize that brainstorm to draft 36 or more quick sketches of different ideas so that we had plenty of fodder to work with when we actually put together our designs.  This was a 5 week project, and each of those 5 weeks we were required to post samples of our work to a discussion board so that we could receive feedback from our classmates and make improvements for the following week.Week 5 we had to have a portfolio put together of all of our work in InDesign and also display our final mockups on Behance, which is this post.

The has been my favorite project out of all of my graphic design classes so far.  I love reading and I love classics and this was a great list.  At first I had a couple of books picked out that I really love that I thought I would work on, but kept coming back to The Scarlet Letter with ideas and finally resigned myself to choosing that one instead.  It had been 25ish years since I had read it, so I listened to the whole thing again and absolutely loved it.  The language is so eloquent and beautiful, and the love story throughout the story of revenge and hypocrisy is so strong that I really wanted to show what a beautiful, character Hester Prynne was even though she wasn't a perfect human.  Initially repulsed by using the color red for the cover, especially for a letter A, I wanted to convey the letter A that Hester wore in white because even though she showed spunk at the gallows she was such a sweet, kind person.  The Puritan church that had so much desire to debase her as a person for an action that she had taken was so much more represented by the color red than I felt like she was.  And her husband, who supposedly forgave her, caused so much agony that he was almost hell incarnate.  But then I realized that red is also the color of love and passion, and even though this is a story about an improper relationship, it also a story of love in different forms and how much more important love and forgiveness are than revenge.  I still loved the idea of presenting the A as white for metaphor and juxtaposition, but I also wanted to include the red to represent the love as well as the anger.  This was maybe more apparent in some of my initial drafts that didn't get included in the final round, but I did Include it in some form in all 3 drafts.

My typography cover shows a silhouette of a somewhat spunky Hester Prynne with her head full of many words beginning with A that were applicable to the book.  I loved how later in the book, the townspeople started to associate her letter A with able instead of adultery, and I felt like she was an angel to the poor and needy around her.  I wanted to show how even though those around her defined her as the letter A that she wore and they gave the meaning to that letter that they wanted her to be associated with, that letter did not define who she was!  She was so many more things than a red A.  So there are many applicable words that apply to the story that make up her silhouette. I did have another version of the cover that I really loved that had a big letter A on the front instead of the silhouette that I actually loved even more than the one that I used but I thought maybe the final choice showed more personality and Hester deserved to be seen.

In my homemade cover, I tried many things, like stitching the title in gold thread on red paper, and doing some lithography prints, and various cutouts.  The idea I ended up going with however, was a cutout of the title from blue paper with a dropped red A that had white paper behind it.  I wanted to show that as the red fell away, there was purity and whiteness under the "title" Hester had been given.  I really liked the idea of the letters being completely cut out of the cover page so that you could see through to what was really inside the book.

The designer's choice cover was the one I saved for last.  Each cover I worked on was my favorite at the time, and I was the most hesitant about doing the designer's choice one because my Illustrator skills are still so wanting, but it ended up being my favorite part in the end.  I had a hard time choosing, and I don't think the one I chose was my favorite either, but just like the typography one I felt like it maybe represented the story best.  this cover displays a silhouette of each of the 4 main characters in the book stacked on top of each other and each in a different color.  The colors weren't random, I felt like the husband  was so full of hate that he deserved to be red.  The pastor was full of blackness because he couldn't bring himself to repent.  Hester became purified throughout the book and thus is white.  And poor little Pearl, the daughter of the unfortunate conception, is also black because she is the symbol throughout so much of the book of the circumstances that brought her to be.  I manipulated the typography multiple times for this cover and I kept the juxtaposition of the bigger red A as a symbol, and used bigger text because I thought the book had so much to say.