Book cover series
Branding | Illustration | Typography
I created a series of book cover jackets, a project lead by Oxford University Press. This featured three titles from the Very Short Introduction series, so I chose The Immune System, Epidemiology and The History of Medicine.
I started by speaking to people in bookshops to gather concept ideas for my covers. They mostly mentioned bold, eye-catching typography as the thing that draws them to a book, so I focused my designs on this.
As the type was causing problems in fitting all the words on my covers, I looked to Gerstner’s Matrix as inspiration as to how to fix the issues.
I then developed a 3 x 4 column grid as the titles are in multiples of 3 or 4 (‘System’ contains 6, ’Medicine’ contains 8, ‘Epidemiology’ contains 12), and arranged the letters accordingly. This idea was inspired by the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, and cover design by Charlotte Strick.
I then made the illustrations using Adobe Illustrator 3D effects, creating the shapes in vector form to then blow up into 3D.
I used the monospaced typeface Liberation Mono for the title as it produced the even spacing for my grid layout. I also experimented with changing the font colour. However, this made the titles difficult to read, especially Epidemiology which not a well known subject anyway. I therefore decided to keep the text fully black, to ensure full readability.
Working on a live brief taught me how to align with a company’s design process and style, as well as implement their brand guidelines in my design.