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A Penguin Book cover with a twist

During our Integrated design methods technical session, we were practising using adobe InDesign and started out by replicating a classic Penguin Book cover. This really helped me get to know my way around the software as it was not something I was previously familiar with. It took a little time and patience for me to get thew hang of it, but I feel like I made significant progress in familiarising myself with adobe programmes. We were then asked to use what we had learnt from this session and apply it to our own version of a Penguin Book cover. This could be whatever we chose, but we had to make it ‘clever’. I chose to design a penguin themed book cover for ‘Fifty shades of Grey’ as I thought this would be an interesting theme. I achieved this by using the base of the classic penguin book cover that we created in this session and then began to change each section, take away parts and add new elements. I replaced the penguin books cloud logo at the top of the page with an image of lips, to echo the erotic and romantic nature of the book. In addition, I replaced the typical penguin icon at the bottom with a couple of romantic penguins as I thought this was a fun play on the original logo.

I found this task to be incredibly useful on developing my digital design skills and it gave me the freedom to create a playful design and have a bit of fun while experimenting and learning. There’s still a lot I need to learn when it comes to the technicalities of using InDesign but I already feel a lot more confident in working with adobe softwares as I had to use photoshop as well in order to create and cut out some of the images.

London – Olympic Underground

The task that I was set was ‘ London’, I actually decided to show this word and this location by showing the simplistic universal logo of the Olympics along with the culmination of the underground logo. Within the first few images or designs that I made were inspired and created with the logo of the Underground with the colours of the Olympic rings implemented into the lettering with this. The final image that I made was a mixture of the Olympic rings and the underground lines coming out of the rings themselves. I feel as these two images and logos are very recognisable, and quite relatable to London as the city of London hosted the Olympics in 2012. Previously the city hosted the games in 1908, 1948, and now 8years ago 2012.

Bang! And The Dirt Is Gone!

As part of the TY1INT1 module, we were asked to explore Adobe InDesign and create our own Penguin Book covers inspired by a book, movie or quote. I landed on the idea of the cleaning products Cillit Bang which are manufactured by Reckitt Benckiser. I used the colour palette from the limescale remover range to design my book cover. These bright purples and oranges allowed me to create an eye-catching and bold design. I wanted to stray from the simple lines and shapes used in classic Penguin Books, and so I came up with the idea of using an almost star-like, explosion shape to highlight the ‘title’ and ‘author’ of my book.  Below is my initial sketch which I used to plan out my ideas.

I am new to all Adobe apps, so this was a fun experience, trying out the tools available to create each element of my book cover. I am pleased with my final outcome, however there are a few areas that I could improve on. I look forward to gaining a better understanding of InDesign and other Adobe apps in the future.

Royalty

 

Cristiana Couciero was my inspiration for this work. She has a simple photomontage style that I thought would be appropriate for the style i am going for.

Using the image shown, I implemented the circle to show the main image. The ruler and protractor outlines show order and depth to the image. The number that I chose in my final work was the day Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. This added more meaning to photomontage. Couciero’s work is centered towards the middle and leaves the outer space empty. The use of black space  allows balance and the text creates more texture.

 

The first image represents supporters and followers. The colour blue gives a calm ambiance to the image and the lighter peach background exudes warmth. Overall, the image is giving a positive aesthetic.

 

 

Instead of a blue circle, it changes to red to give a more aggressive tone. The blue background compliments the red and makes it more dynamic as it’s darker. Mark making were used to replaced the measurements to represent more chaos and irregularity.  The photos of the fans were replaced with paparazzi to represent the invasion of privacy and loudness that they represent.

AP

Using the Futura typeface, both medium and bold, I experimented with how the 2 letters – A and P could be incorporated together as a single unit, motif or symbol. I began by merging the letters next to each other, however it seemed that it could easily be misread as a letter R. Therefore, I explored flipping one of the letters upside down, leading to my 7th and final design solution, where the cross bar of the A merges into the the counter of the P. This creates an interesting ‘impossible staircase’ type aesthetic. I would like to further explore with colour .

Labyrinth

Labyrinth: a family moves into a house with unexpected spatial characteristics. The rooms keep shifting position every time a door is opened. The family members are trapped inside the house and start a journey to find the front door. While they keep moving from one room to the next, they discover that they are not the only ones lost in the impossibly infinite labyrinth of the house.

I shaped first half of the book in the outline of a house which can be seen to have a door and a variety of stairs to create the labyrinth affect in the background. I felt that my front page in the first page to the story and is a good way of visualising telling the story.

Here the inside of my book can be seen, on the left is this idea of stairs created out of the books pages, all being connected to a single door. Representing the idea of once the door closes another room appears on the other side. In a way the door represents a portal.

on the right hand page Is the outline of a door getting smaller and smaller as you go though the pages, representing the never ending of this house. I burned the stairs on this page to show them disappearing as you go through the each door.

 

Simplicity is Key

For Berta’s session today the brief was to bring forward the visual dimensions of the story. The story I chose was titled “obsession”.

I first experimented with ripping, crunching, cutting and glueing pages to create this double page spread below.

From this experimentation I liked the effect of the highlighted words so I took this further to create the double page spread you can see at the top of the page. For the left hand side I chose to isolate just one word that was in the middle of the body of text. This represented the womans solitude and calmness at the beginning of the book. For the second page I chose to isolate a number of words that were scattered all around the text, all the words I chose had negative meanings or connotations. The scattered yet isolated aesthetic helped to portray the womans thoughts which were no longer in focus and kept flicking between the book she was reading and the fear of what was going on behind her. In the end I liked the simplicity of my final design and I think it got across exactly what I wanted it to.

Happiness

The idea:

The image which immediately sprang to mind when considering “happiness” was a sunflower, maybe because of the colour yellow, or maybe because the word “sunflower” just sounds happy. I liked the idea of a whimsical character so I gave the sunflower a smiling expression. To turn this image on its head, I drew from the connection between a crop such as sunflowers which are used for oil, and the harmful effects of pesticides used in their production. It is well known that bees are dying at an alarming rate due to factors such as pesticides, so I thought to include dead bees to dampen the mood of this otherwise joyful scene.

The process:

I began by sketching the idea out and inking over it with a drawing pen. On Illustrator I then vectorized the image and coloured it on photoshop. Upon recommendation I animated a camera pan from the top of the image (the happy part) to the bottom (the sad part). I also duplicated the image and darkened it several times to give the animation more depth. I’d never made a GIF on photoshop before so this was a new experience for me

Reflection:

While I think I’ve achieved my goals well, when linking the outcome to the actual brief, I’ve realized that the link between happiness to ecocide is a bit tenuous. This is an important finding as to me, it highlights how it is easy to follow your own interpretation of a brief instead of the actual one.