Reflection on the book cover in situe.

Developing my book jacket, I decided to print out the final versions I created, wrap it round the book itself and took it into Waterstones to see what it would look like when placed among other books!

Placed among other Penguin Books - Version 1

" - Version 2

Version 1 - Front Cover

Version 2 - Front Cover

Spine

Since my initial ideas, I re-worked the cover focusing on the colours - BLUE, RED AND WHITE. This is because they are the colours of the American Flag, and as its an American text, I thought that I could possibly bring in this colour palette to work with to push my ideas. As you can see above our two versions I printed. Version 1 shows the blue front cover, its back cover is in red…

And Version 2 is the opposite, red front cover with blue back cover…

Here I have split the imagery of the car repeats and placed them above and below the text. For the spine, I though that the title and authors name only looked quite plain. This is why I also added the image of the small car n the dark silhouette at the top of the spine to link in with the covers. I also experimented with using the exact scanned in prints as this has a texture to it, and  I compared this to making each car a flat colour. At first I thought that the flat colours would be more successful on the cover, even though I preferred the textured because for a penguin/puffin book jacket I thought it might work better for its audience. But talking to others they all seem to like the textural images, so this difference could add something extra to the cover and be a bit more interesting to look at than just plain colour. Also. I moved away from the prints where I had worked over the top with text, to the simpler silhouetted car in a darker colour to show the difference within the car repeats. This version is simpler and I think works clearer than the others. The spine needs a bit more work - moving the text to the left a little so its more centred but apart from that I am really happy with the front cover and spine. The back cover may need some more work as some have said it seems a bit repetitive. Not really adding anything more to the cover so does it really need to be there? Maybe I could crop some of the texture from the print and place it behind the text or lino cut a line of cars or top of cars, so the imagery is different to what is established on the front. But I have been working on this cover for many days now, so what I'm going to do now is move onto my next project, then come back to it in a couple of weeks with a fresh head!