The brief

Choose a book by an author you are familiar with.  You will design two different covers for it, one using illustrations or photography and the other using just type.

Design the whole cover, including the spine and back page.  Include the title of the book, the author’s name, a brief description of the story and any other information you think is necessary.

As you are working, remember that your design is intended to help a reader know what the experience of reading the book will be.  Is it a serious book or an off-beat funny novel?  Are the readers expected to be young women or older men, and does this matter?  Is it an ‘easy read’ or ‘literary’?  Does the publisher have a house style you need to be part of?

When you have finished critique your work – which of your two designs do you feel works the most successfully and why?

Choosing a book

I am selecting ‘The Layover’ by Lacie Waldon.  Lacie Waldon is a best-selling author with her head in the clouds – literally.  A flight attendant based in Los Angeles, Waldon spends her days writing from the jump seat and searching the world for new stories.  Her novels, ‘The Layover’ and ‘From the Jump’, have received critical praise and featured by USA Today, Buzzfeed, PopSugar, Forbes, and many other publications. (Good Reads, 2009)

This is a romantic comedy about a flight attendant who falls in love with her nemesis, an ex-pilot, and it turns her life upside down.  It is witty, breezy and a story about love, 30 000 feet above the ground.

When their layover time extends because the aeroplane malfunctioned, they find themselves spending more quality, entertaining, crazy wild time at a luxury resort in Belize.  Belize is a country on the north-eastern coast of Central America.  It borders Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south.

I have read through the reviews on Good Reads to get a broader perspective of the audience and their opinion about the book, and the readers are mostly women between the ages of twenty to forty.  It is a book that makes you ‘feel good, smile, dance, drink tequila shots and celebrate your life’.  Some people called it a ‘fun and fluffy’ book and the ‘perfect book to read to escape over the weekend’.

The cover

 The cover is an illustration and captures the feel of the book accurately.  An illustration is an ideal way to capture a book’s ‘fun and fluffy’ feel.  Aeroplanes can be frightening to some people, but they can just as much be exciting and depict the feeling of adventure, travel and holidays.  For this reason, it is imperative to capture the right mood on the cover to clearly communicate that it is not a thriller, but a romantic comedy about love and fun.

Other books about aeroplanes as the common denominator

The Last Flight by Julie Clark is a fiction novel and a mystery thriller with page-turning suspense.

Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival by Laurence Gonzalez is a documentary about United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago experienced extreme mechanical malfunction while at a cruising height of 37,000 feet.  Its cockpit crew made a heroic effort to bring the DC-10 under control but was forced to make a crash landing at the airport in Sioux City, Iowa.  The immense aircraft hit the ground at more than twice the normal landing speed, careened across grass and concrete, and exploded in flames.  Astonishingly, of the 296 people aboard, 184 survived. (Yardley, 2014)

Penguin Random House

Reading through the book Penguin by Design, A Cover Story 1935 – 2005, by Phil Baines, it is clear to me that the approach to the company’s identity should be respected and adhered to by both the illustrator, agent and author.  I have visited their website and was delighted to learn how helpful it is and provides a template to book designers and illustrators in a pdf format (figure 2) and a detailed version in an InDesign file format.

Exploring photography for the book

I have used mainly illustrations for my designs throughout this section; therefore, I will use photographs for this book design.  I will use my own photos, which are part of my visual diary and photos from stock images.  Now that I have the book’s dimensions and the Penguin logos’ placement specifics, I can go ahead with designing the cover, spine and back page.  

Designing the cover

First, I sketched out a few layout options on paper of where I will place the text and pictures.  I already had an idea of the image I wanted to create with the photos from my visual reference figure 5.

I considered the layout with- and without the image.  Once I had an idea of different layouts, I created the book cover image by layering different photos, backgrounds, using blending modes, masks and special effects in Adobe Photoshop. 

The image was then placed in InDesign to see how it interacts with the Penguin template’s guides, trim marks, logos, and margins.

I am pleased with how the images came out.  It will serve as a nice background for the text and I was going for a “chick lit” feel that conveys a mood of a relaxing holiday read.  I will explore the text next and choose a typeface for the title, the author’s name and the smaller text on the book.

The text combinations that I think will work the best are; the second column, the top combination and the bottom one (figure 12).  Both have a script font which is less formal and appropriate for a fun and romantic book.  They have good contrast and the fonts pair well together.  I have decided to go for the top combination for both the text-only and text-and-image versions.

The design with the image and text works the best for this book.  This book is about adventure, romance and is called “chick lit”.  The cover with the picture seems more adventurous, while the cover without the image is more dreamy.

I like the cover without the image for an aviation story because the background looks like the clouds viewed from an aeroplane, but it is not energetic enough for this book.  The image with the plane (image 8) was too light and sensitive for this book.

Script typeface: Confiteria Script

Sans-Serif typeface: Verdana Pro

The two typefaces work well together.  Verdana Pro is a humanist typeface with an overall organic structure and pairs well with a script typeface.  The shocking purple-pink fits the book as it represents a party feel and neon lights.

Overall, this exercise was insightful, especially discovering the story behind Penguin Books and how they have been specific about the consistent use and position of the logo to ensure the publisher’s identity.  I could further apply the layout skills I have learned in the previous sections and apply it to book design.

Works Cited

Good Reads. (2009, August). Lacie Waldon. Retrieved from Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20720729.Lacie_Waldon

Yardley, J. (2014). Book review: Flight 232 A story of disaster and survival. Washington Post.