OUGD603 - Penguin Book Cover 2019 - Initial Ideas

The book itself touches on some interesting themes that could be explored for the visual aspect of the project. Quotes or short reviews of the book allowed me to understand the audience's interpretation of the story and how this might be transferred to the design of the cover. One particular idea that came to mind was to make the inclusion of typography a focus point of the design, meaning the cover would rely heavily on the letterforms for the visuals.

• Recreate the existing design in a type based way
• Explore the ways in which type is altered to create imagery.
• Explore the colours used in the cover and how to contrast different shades.
• Explore what makes a cover appealing to young audiences (ages 8 - 14).
• Visualise Auggie's face in some way, using typography.
• Playful and youthful colour schemes.
• Themes of individuality

visual research ideas

Using these images as a visual starting point for the design, the cover would use typography to build up an image of something. The idea I had in mind for this, would be to create the cover out of text and distort the letterforms in a way that would show Auggie's facial disfigurement.

The existing cover makes use of minimal colour schemes, which help it to reflect a playful simplistic approach, ideal to it's target audience. In the same way, establishing a similar colour scheme to use for the new cover would bring originality to the design but also pay homage to the original. Therefore, I started by picking 3 shades of blue that could be used in the starting stages of the design process.

In relation to the theme of individuality, I first started with an alternative idea to see whether this could potentially be used. The idea was to visualise 'not fitting in' which made me think about a puzzle and the pieces within it. This visual included a puzzle piece that did not fit or look the same as the rest. After early critique on this idea, it was clear that the typographic approach was a better idea to pursue.

Therefore, the type design process began and started off with several quick variations. What I found was that the word 'Wonder' could be split into two halves and evenly divided into a square shape. This then brought about the idea to alter the letter 'O' within the title and later the entire title. Drawing several different head shaped silhouettes interpreting Auggie's appearance helped to come up with the guideline shape in which the text would be positioned.

The result was a closely combined title, that would take up the majority of the cover space.