FINAL BOOK COVER DESIGN FOR THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

xingyu zhong
Oct 25, 2017
4 min read

Continue as last week, I choose to farther develop this design for my book cover after all the feedback from everyone. Brizida suggested using sans serif for the title would be better. So, I spent a lot of time to try different sans serif fonts. And here are some of the trys below.

Then, I pick one of them to make my first completed version of the book cover.

When I sent them to Dan, he gave me several helpful suggestions. He said the dots are currently creating the a grid that I could align everything else to it by continuing the same grid across the spine, flaps, and back cover. And about the fonts of the title, he suggested I can use the grid and the dots to inform my type decisions. He also gave me an example by aligning the title to the grids and using a typeface with dots. But I noticed he was using serif typeface in his example, then I asked which one I should use because Brizida and he have different suggestions. He then told me to try everything out to find the best one.

Dan also gave us some helpful information about the text part like the golden ratio for leading in the long text = 1.6 × font size; 10ish words per line for long text; add more margin between the egdes of the contents and the cover, etc.

Actually, even after I tried different typefaces again, I still could not tell which one works the best. But I think a hand writing style might fit better because the dots and the line were hand drawn. So, I picked Bradley Hand ITC as the typeface for my next refinement. I also did everything mentioned above in this refinement. See below.

Then, I tried to print it out to see how it would look like. Well, that was actually the most clear thing I did, lol. I found the black color of the dots and the line was too grey, not dark enough compared to the color of the texts. Also, the introduction of the author seemed too long which made the whole block too close to the bottom edge of the cover compared to other margins here. Besides, I thought it would be better to have the contents of the flaps aligned, both the head line and bottom line. So, here comes my third refinement.

In the refinement above, I made the color of the black dots and line more dark and shorten the introduction of the author to align the contents of the flaps. Then, I took this version to the FedEx Office to get it printed. However, since I made this for a 6in × 9in size book and the whole size of the book cover was 19in × 9in, they didn't have any paper could fit this size. So, I had to change it to a smaller size which is for a 5.5in × 8in size book, 18in × 8in for the whole book cover. That is my fourth refinement.

But, as I was discussing the typeface with Dan, he said I could draw the fonts directly on the book cover to get a more special hand written typeface. Then, I asked if I could also draw the dots and the line directly on the cover too because the colors of the color pencil drawing looks much better than printed ( the colors would change as I took a picture of my drawings and got them digitally, but I couldn't get the colors the same as my drawings no matter how ). He said, it could be a good idea. So, I tried all of them in the last minute. I made three versions of the same design concept at the end, one is all printed, one is only the dots and line were hand drawn, the other one is both the title and the dots and line were hand drawn.

Here are the photos of the real book covers:

1. All printed

2. Only the dots and line drawn

3. Both title and dots and line drawn

Because they are photos here, the colors might not look big different. But, when you look at the real book covers, you can see the drawn ones has more brilliant colors than the printed one.

I took all of them to the class today for the presentation. And it turned out most of the class liked the one with both title and dots and line drawn better. I like it too. But, I am also thinking how this would work in the real industry. Because if it is real got produced, there would be so many book covers, it is not realistic to get every one of them drawn by hand, and they wouldn't be the same in that case either. But, I don't know how to get the colors and the sketch feeling of the color pencils right in the digital version either. It seems like there are still a lot of technology skills to learn.

At the end of the class, Dan gave me more revise suggestions for the text part like no orphan words in the last long text line, the long text should be aligned to the left. Here is the final design including those suggestions.