Evaluation for 'The Outsiders' Book Jacket.

I decided that my first project would be in response to the Penguin Design’s brief for the puffin book jacket of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. This is because it was very tight brief that gives you first-hand experience of a live book cover brief. I also enjoy working with text and imagery so thought this would be a great project to do.

The main starting points in response to the narrative were picking up some of the important symbols within the prose. These were eyes, cars and the gun. Also the themes of isolation and the divide between the upper and lower middle social classes was what I wanted to evoke within my imagery. As there is also death and violence within the prose, I starting to experiment with thumbprints as well. Initially I started drawing cars; experimenting with silhouettes and line, drawing eyes from primary photographic reference and then working with thumb prints. A turning point within this project was when I experimented with printing techniques – mono printing and lino printing. This was definitely the biggest development in the project as I carried on with the linocuts into my final design. When discovering that I wanted to use the prints of the cars for my cover, the colour palette was the next stage. Colours mentioned in the prose were Blue and Rusty Red, and this was in reference to the colours of the cars as well as the colour of blood. ­­­­

Placing my book cover designs wrapped around a dummy book and placing it within bookshops amongst published books, helped me determine what colours worked well and what elements of my designs were successful and unsuccessful. Working with a blue stood out more amongst other books than the red I found. This is because many other covers seemed to work with a red palette and I wanted to produce a cover that really stood out from others. Especially as I was working with the concept of the ‘outsiders’ who are isolated from society, I thought blue could evoke the feelings of solitude and being pushed coldly aside. I first decide to work with the Sans Serif: Avenir Book as I liked working with a contemporary typeface contrasting against the older narrative, bringing a new feel to the book rather than a traditional “penguin” design look.

My two initial designs used two different colour palettes. The front cover worked strongly, but my first idea for the back cover using a strip of the front cover pattern with the blurb placed in between it did not work as well. Feedback on this said that it did not work as the imagery firstly was not adding anything more to the cover, so does it really need to be there? And it did not mirror my compositional ideas of the front cover. The front cover is quite fluid and plays attention to the placement of text within the image, whereas the back cover compared to this, is quite static and separate. Another suggestion was whether more detail could be added to the car silhouette featuring the title? I responded to this feedback by adding more finer detail to the car on Photoshop, and I also printed an extension of the design of the cars to be placed on the whole of the back cover. Immediately I could see that this did work better. The next step was to consider the placement of the blurb to reflect the ideas of the composition in the front cover.

With a lot of playing about in the InDesign with the kerning and tracking of type, I integrated the text into the image by using a print edited in Photoshop to make space for the blurb. I approached the composition as well as the design of the spine. Looking in bookstores, I noticed many teenage books included a ‘logo’ within the spine so they could be distinguished and also stand out within the bookshelf. Therefore I wanted to do this too and added the ‘outsiders’ car isolated within the spine as well. The two ideas of placement were at the top of the spine or centralised. Also I couldn’t decide between the two colour options. The first with the dark blue some thought was more aesthetically pleasing than the red, but personally I preferred the red as I thought it was more eye-catching and also worked well with my concept. The red, blue and white/cream represents the American narrative as well as the red relating to the colour of the rusty red blood spilled within the story. Also, the logo works better central as when just looking at the spine, this placement stands out more. It means it is not placed next to the puffin logo as well when you look at the jacket as a spread. So I initially submitted the second version to Penguin.

Last minute, I had some feedback from Eleanor Crow and her opinion was very important as she works within the book publishing industry and actually commissions illustrators to produce book covers. She suggested that the typeface might work better with a slab serif font. This is because the font I was using – Avenir Book, its line thickness did not relate to the line work within the image as well as it looked too contemporary. Slab serif typefaces were often used in the 1950s into the 1960s and as this is near the era of the publication and time set of the narrative, it would make more sense to use this. So the night before submission I researched into different slab serifs and ended using Josefin Slab for the final cover.

Looking at the cover with this typeface I think it really does work better, as you can see the relationship of the letter thickness to the imagery as well as it works better with my concept.

Reflecting back on the project, I am really pleased and confident with my outcome. This is a big step for me, as I do not normally like my own work and feels shy showing my work in group critiques. But I feel I have definitely developed my illustrative practice and voice within this project. Initially at the start of the project after the research report hand in I found it very hard to get started, but learning new methods of working with printing techniques and pushing my Photoshop and InDesign skills really helped me to move forwards. I enjoyed working with text as well as imagery and approaching this to integrate fluidly within my cover was challenging but fun. One of the issues I came across was as a designer and illustrator, we look at the book jacket as a whole spread. When it is actually in situ, it is viewed as a separate front cover/spine/back cover. I feel like I have a learnt a lot from this project and I will push and develop these skills into my next project. One of the weaknesses in this project was that I did not explore more of my starting thumbnail ideas for the cover. If I developed a few more ideas earlier I could have had some more designs to choose from. But the cars worked strongly with my ideas and concept, and this is why I pursued it extensively. This was one of my strengths as the cover went through a great editing process.

Initially I proposed that I would undertake 3 projects. The Penguin Design competition, the Cath Kidston brief and an extension of BA7. This has now changed as I spent longer than I thought I would on this project. This is because I started to really enjoy working on the book cover design and I wanted to keep working on it until the official deadline (2^nd April,) to really explore and finely edit my work to its full potential. This means I will now move on to my last project (the extension of BA7,) and I will push my strengths of working with pattern, line and simplicity explored in this first project further onto the next.

Final Submission