Project 4: Book Cover Design

PROJECT DUE: 11.12.15 (Thursday)

Overview: 

For this project you will design a book cover for a biography or autobiography. By now, you should have finalized your choice of individual. The book and person about whom the book is written must actually exist, and cannot be fictitious.

 Details: 

Once you have chosen your biography, it is important that you do some research about this person. Write up the following details:

• Name
• Book Title
• Book Author
• Birth Date - Death Date (if applicable)
• 3 - 5 key facts about the person which will dictate the concept and style of your book cover design

This book cover design should be as realistic as possible. In order for this to be convincing, look at other books to see what information they include on the cover. These items include:

• Book title
• Author
• Publisher's logo
• Bar code
• Book price
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Author bio (if not an autobiography)

All imagery must be created by you, with the exception of the publisher's logo, bar code, and author's photo (if included). Don't go for the most obvious concept, or simply try to draw the person's portrait for the cover. Think of some intriguing way to capture the tone of the person's personality and life's accomplishments through your original illustrations and/or photography, type choices, composition, and color palette.

Presentation: 

You will be presenting a board with your book jacket shown in a flat layout as well as an actual book with your jacket design wrapped around it. You should get a hardcover book to wrap in your jacket design. Once again, craft will be very important. Your book should look as if it just came from Barnes and Noble or Amazon. :) Keep your book size in the ball park of 6" x 9", because that will be easier for you.

First Steps: 

Tuesday (11/3) you must have all of the above questions answered. In class on Thursday, I spoke to many of you, but not everyone had this info finished. You also should have your physical book chosen or picked out and brought to class, with dimensions already measured for your book cover, so we can set those up in Illustrator. Finally, sketches need to be in progress, with concepts already laid out in your sketchbook. 

I decided it would be best to extend the deadline to 12 November after all, but that means on 10 November, I will give you the last packaging assignment so you can make your key decisions about what you will do for it. Go ahead and be thinking about items you'd like to repackage between now and then, so your package idea can be approved ASAP.

See you Tuesday!