The Tiny Star Fragments Within
Type: Class Project
Time Taken: 1 day | Software Used: Adobe Illustrator, Medibang Paint Pro
Based on haiku we had written, we had to design a book cover for a class. I chose the haiku:
"Searching for the stars
All in the sky high above
But none here with us."
I wrote two poems for the text content of the cover, and decided to connect the themes of the cover to one of them, and thus named the book “The Tiny Star Fragments Within”. I chose to layout it like the cover page of a poetry collection. The colours I chose were various shades of monochromatic dull blue, with bright yellow.
The literal meaning of the haiku is that all the stars we can see are in the sky above us, and not amongst us. Thus I drew a sky full of stars on the book flaps.
However, the metaphorical meaning of the haiku is that we are searching for stars in the sky, looking high above us and not being able to reach them because of the distance, instead of also noticing the stars on the earth, in the form of people and things we love and cherish. The speaker of the haiku is saying it in exasperation, that people are unable to look at the truth right in front of their eyes.
This, I represented by drawing a group of people letting go of paper boats in the river, with the paper boats representing stars on the earth. Paper boats are connected to many of our warm memories of childhood, and thus show the stars within things and happy memories, while the ones in their hands represent the stars inside people itself.
Strange the Dreamer Cover
Strange the Dreamer Dust Jacket
Strange the Dreamer
Type: Class Project
Time Taken: 2 days | Software Used: Adobe Illustrator, Medibang Paint Pro
I took up the task of redesigning the cover of Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor, for the final assignment of our class 'Visual Tools'.
This book is a young adult fantasy, about an orphan named Lazlo Strange, and his journey of how he gets to the forgotten city of Weep, and what he discovers there. The reason I chose this book was because the storytelling and prose dragged me in in a way I see rarely in books. The imagery is extremely vivid. For example, the author does not describe blue as merely blue, but "Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring -not summer- sky".
The colour scheme is based on the colours of the moths (a prominent motif), with there being one hundred moths on the book jacket for the hundred moths in the book. I put into use the different principles of design we had learnt in this class, such as closure and emphasis to let my design tell a part of the story inside their pages.
For me, this project was very meaningful as I have always loved reading books since I was a child. My interest in design came about by observing their covers. I also love adding in hidden details and an abundant amount of meaning into my work, which matched up perfectly with this project.