Book Cover Design - The Guardian

My work friend has asked me to design a cover for her first ever book. The book is called "The Guardian" and is a teenage fiction novel featuring angels and demons.

With this knowledge in hand I created a mood board to show my client what ideas I had in mind.

The mood board featured various imagery of angels, artistic styles and various types of font that I believe would work well. My client was happy with what I had shown her and picked out her favourite font from the selection I had provided.


For the next step,  I created a mock up design using standard dimensions of paper-back book covers. I decided to to use my "crouching angel" drawing that I had created earlier, however I went over it with a brush tipped pen and water to create calligraphy effect.

I went for a grungy/dirty feel as I think it works well with the drawing style and the genre of the book.

I added the title and authors name using separate fonts, if the book is published I will have to make sure  that I've bought the licence to use these fonts.

After some feedback from my client I have created a second mock up design for the cover. 

My client wanted the cover to include a young woman's face as to reflect the main female character in the book. I drew a sketch of a face, scanned it in and manipulated it on photoshop so that I would be in the back ground of the image, but slightly faded so not to conflict with the rest of the images in the design. I also amended the author's name to her chosen Pen name.

I am now awaiting feedback of the second cover mock up.

Follow Lindsay's blog to find out more about the book and to keep up to date with developments.

Reflection

Personal Achievements 

One of my main achievements for this year is that I have persevered with Adobe Illustrator even though I find it harder to use compared to Photoshop. However, it is better for some graphic design work. I forced myself to use it for a number of design pieces and I feel much more confident with it and I'm proud of what I have produced. Another achievement is time management, I have not left everything to the last minute and have spread tasks out to make them more manageable. I feel that it has made me less stressed and my quality of work has improved.

Skills Development

As I have already mentioned my skills with Adobe Illustrator has improved and I feel confident with using it to create fairly complicated design projects. I have improved with Google Sketchup, even though I haven't used it much in my recent projects, some minor tuition and experimentation has allowed my skills to develop well. My understanding of brand identity and logo design has also improved, I have designed a logo for myself and during that process I learnt what makes a good logo design.

Summer/Final year Action plan

During the summer I aim to undertake my own design projects and enter various competitions with the aim to increase my design skills and add to my portfolio of work. I also plan to try and obtain some short-term work experience placements with the aim to gain more experience and gain important contacts in the design world.  For my final year of the Foundation Degree I plan to get more acquainted with the various design packages that are imperative to a graphic design career. I also aim to increase my knowledge of design processes and regulations so I'm more au fait with how the whole design industry works, which will ultimately make me more employable


Overall, my second year has been an interesting one, I have learnt a great deal about myself and how I work as well as new design processes and techniques, I am proud of what I have achieved and look forward to learning and achieving much more. 

Portfolio

I have created a portfolio to showcase my best work up to now. I have tried to keep the design similar to my CV and blog to create a continuing brand identity. I like the simple, clean design and the bold but easy to read font.

I have decided to keep it in only electronic format and plan to save it on a branded USB stick which can be given out (see image below). The electronic format means that I can also email it to companies and easily add new pages.

I have saved it as a PDF as this is a industry standard for publications such as my portfolio and it allows computers and applications of various types to open it without any change to the layout of the document.

See my portfolio here.

Paul Smith Envelope Competition

Our group was tasked in creating a envelope design that could be featured in a new Paul Smith store in London. This is my entry for the competition: