Dystopian Book Covers.
Research:
I started the cover design process with research. I researched a range of related topics such as book cover designers, classic penguin book covers, the Marber grid, and the process of designing book covers. This researched helped inform me throughout the design process, overall improving the quality of the final outcomes.
Asset Creation and Experimentation:
Once I had chosen the connecting theme for the books and the titles themselves I began creating different assets in a range of different mediums. This experimentation helped to give me a reference for what direction I should take the final designs in, giving me different examples of work to compare to see what looks the nicest.
Here are a couple photos of the telescreen paper construction I created for the cover of 1984, by layering pieces of card with at a distance from each other and lighting it from behind I could get a really unique design that linked to the theme of the book it was designed for.
Another medium I tried was hand drawing some designs I could use for a cover design. To the left there are the drawings I created and an example of one of the book covers that I created from these drawings. although the drawings did not make it into any of the final designs, I found that creating these covers helped me learn more about cover layout and visual hierarchy.
One more example of a medium I experimented with was linocut print making. This was very interesting as it was something I had never tried before. The cover I created using this method was of the savage reservations described in 'Brave New World'. The rough quality of the prints made them a good match for the imagery but the style wasn't consistent with the other books in the series so I decided to use a different design.
Creating iterations:
One of the things that helped a lot with designing the book covers was creating different iterations as I went through the design process. This allowed me to compare different colour schemes, layouts, and other elements of the designs.
Final Cover Designs:
Here is the set of three final cover designs for the dystopian novels; The Sleeper Awakes (H.G. Wells), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), and 1984 (George Orwell).