Book cover analysis - study task 3 (OUGD406)

Study task 3 was a crit with other people on the book covers. The opinions were...

• Shows breaking design rules
• The design on the back is more effective
• No relevance to writing - looks more like a photography book, does not relate to the content
• Scary looking 
• Looks like a book on Ted Bundy
• Making essay writing look less mundane would be good
• Does not represent the book as a whole
• Looks like a print mistake as the type does not read in the right order
• Yellow and black does not work, looks like a crime and danger book
• Uncomfortable feeling, uninformed and would expect a more crisp look

Words people used to describe the design were

• Thoughtless
• Irrelevant
• Thoughtless
• Tasteless
• Uninformed
• Lazy
• Eye Saw
• Uncomfortable 

The next part of this task was to subvert the negative words, choose a typeface thats relevant to the book, decide on a hierarchy of information then create a black and white typographic treatment from this information.

The subverts of my words were

• Well thought out
• Relevant
• Informed
• Comfortable

From these I decided possible typefaces could be

• Helvetica
• Futura 
• Universal typeface

These typefaces are much more relevant to the content of the book and are comfortably recognisable in the design world and highly appreciated.

This is my first idea sketch for the typographic treatment. I wanted to create a modernist design that practiced having no emotional attachment in the design and just portrayed the information in a simple and legible way. I decided on the pt sizes and to use Helvetica regular and bold.

This next design idea was also pretty simple but I made the title really bold to stand out more, once again using Helvetica to keep the design comfortable and not portraying connotations through the font.

My last design was less of a modernist design as I wanted the type to spread across the whole cover using the same pt size but editing the tracking. I think this could be interesting as the book isn't just about modernism.

In the end I went with the first idea. I used Helvetica bold for the title, regular for the subtitle and bold for the authors. I decided on this hierarchy because the title is the most important piece of information, next I decided the subtitle and authors names would be the same pt size but the names be bold. I decided this because the authors are really well known and would definitely give design students the incentive to read the book so its important information. Now to see if the design treatment successfully portrayed more positive words than the original design we did a mini crit where people wrote down what they thought. The opinions given were...

• Very bold- Looks like a similar font to the original.
• Modern
• Ordered
• Consistent
• Straight to the point
• Readable
• Legible
• Simple
• Obvious
• Contemporary
• Use of size and weight = eye catching, simple and clear
• Academic 
• Focused

I was really happy with this feedback as this design was clearly a success. I think the fact people said it was academic is really good as the book is essentially an aim for writing essays.