Conventions of a book cover spread

The books that I decided to label were 'The Wind in the Willows' which is the book I am designing for my final piece and 'Candyfloss'.

As it is quite an old book it was missing a lot of things like a bar code and information on the right flap. However, I thought it was a good choice of book to label because it is the book that I am going to design for my exam.

Pink: Authors name
Green: Book title
Orange: Illustrators name
Yellow: Award notice

Pink: Barcode
Green: Award label

Orange: Book title
Green: Authors name
Pink: Name of publishing company

Yellow: Synopsis of the book

Yellow: Photo and blurb about the author

Proposition

Photos of subject matter

As a result from the bad weather recently I captured some images of a fallen tree, this is from the wind which is also one of the elements (air).

Drawings of subject matter

Gipi:





































One of the characters in The Wind in the Willows is Toad, he is quite a significant character in the book.

The main character in the book is a mole called Mole, it would make sense to have him on the front cover.

    A lot of the book covers that I looked at on Pinterest had just an oblique image on the cover, as I was reading the book I noticed that one of the illustrations had a dragonfly. I thought it would be a good drawing to have on the cover because of it being being oblique it adds interest as it's not as obvious. Also, it has relevance to two elements of the theme: water and air. Dragonfly larvae spend most of their life in water, and then when they develop into dragonflys and spend the rest of their lives in the air.

The last thing that I drew was a williow because of the title of the book (Wind in the Willows) this drawing has relevance to the title. However, there isn't much mention in the book about willows.

Scamps of other designers

I drew some already existing book covers, scanned them in, adjusted the levels to brighten the white and the black, and then removed the white.

Then, using the lasso tool I coloured the drawings.

These ones I coloured in more detail.































Here are some I did that I didn't colour in as much detail.

Similar artefacts- Screenshots of book cover design Pinterest board

I liked the look of the vintage book covers as I found they were quite simple but very eye catching.

Brainstorm ideas for Book Cover

I brainstormed 3 different genres of books: Fiction, Non Fiction and Childrens Books. There are two mind maps for fiction as I found quite a lot of books. Here are some of my ideas:

Fiction

• The Lord of the Rings
• The Lovely Bones
• The Kite Runner
• Wuthering Heights
• A Chill in the Air
• Moby Dick
• Breaking Bad
• A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Twilight 
• The Clockwork Orange 
• A Wife's Tale
• Leviathan
• Moby Dick

All these books include either, water, air, fire or earth in some way so have relevance. Some even include more than one element.

Non Fiction

• Dinosaurs- when the comet crashed on the earth and wiped them out. 
• Gardening book which could be about anything such as: vegetables, cacti, trees, flowers, fungi etc.
• Wildlife- garden pests, insects such as: butterflies and bees etc.
• Natural world disasters like: Tsunamis, Volcanoe eruptions, earthquakes and hurricanes.
• Autobiographies and biographies

Childrens Books

• Charlotte's Web
• The Secret Garden
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• James and the Giant Peach
• Alice in Wonderland
• The Wind in the Willows
• Midnight
• Candyfloss 
• Dragonfly
• The Rainbow-Fish

The two ideas I like the most is a non-fiction book and a fiction book. The non-fiction book is one that I would create myself about dinosaurs because I could incorporate more than one element on my cover. I could have an image of earth (earth) a comet hurtling towards earth (fire) and the oceans on earth (water). The other idea that I liked was a fiction book called 'The Wind in the Willows' which also has a lot of relevance to the elements.