PROJECT 5: Graphics - Book Cover

For the Graphics brief in this project, we were tasked with creating a cover for a book, with the only condition being that it be a book that has been/the author has been awarded a Nobel prize. I chose Death in Venice by Thomas Mann for very simplistic reasons: not only did I like the name but, although I haven't read the actual book, the summary of the story intrigued me on how I could portray the plot through the cover's artwork.

I wanted to play around with themes I hadn't really explored before, including illustration and contrasting styles of illustration to piece together something that was not only aesthetically effective but also expressed the theme of the book without giving anything away. I started with drawing an outline of an image I found of Venice by simply tracing over the image with a paint pen and adding stylistic elements to give it a very sketchy aesthetic. The use of this was meant to connect to the character of the story who was an author and this could connect to his handwriting. I also wanted to express this through the typography I designed but also wanted to have a contrast between the words "Death" and "Venice" to portray the connotations of death as a dark, scary thing and Venice as a place of beauty.

The use of multimedia in this design process proved to be a very simple process but I ended up coming out with many variations due to the difficulty in keeping the design simple and not too busy and I feel I did well to avoid overcrowding the cover. The use of colour was decided right at the end of the design process which is not normally how it goes or how it should go but was due to last minute reiterations to the concept as the silhouetted shapes were initally just meant to be outlines, and the addition of block colour made it difficult to stick to the main colour scheme of simple red, black and white and so this was changed to shades of grey, black and a darker red. Overall this design turned out to the standard I had hoped, but if given more time, I would like to finalise the piece with a bit more finesse.