OUGD505 - Covered

The usage of the Y as a martini glass is very cool. I also like the textured stock as well as the minimalist style. I feel like books nowadays that use photography or extensive illustration end up looking tacky and cliched. An intelligent and minimalist design always works better in my opinion. 

The restricted colour palette on this book would work for this brief. The handrendered type looks cool when placed inside of the lightning bolt, and the contrast of colours and size of the black and white is balanced nicely.

Covered Rationale / Evaluation

This brief was very strange to me, as I didn’t know whether I was creating a book cover to be shown in an art gallery, or a poster which was of a book cover to be viewed primarily at exhibition. I decided to create a piece of work which I believed would work commercially, but felt that my final piece would also work at exhibition because of the contrast between mine and other people’s work, highlighting it. After watching many videos of Noam Chomsky speak about his political and philosophical views it is clear that his opinions are impossible to distill or simplify. His polemic on neo-liberalism is unrelenting and his views on the U.S and other major powers are very aggressive. He identifies as anarcho-syndicalist which visually creates no imagery that isn’t clichéd. He is known as the father of modern linguistics which does conjure some images, however the book I am designing for is Profit Over People, mostly unrelated to his work with language. The topics covered include U.S imperialism and capitalism, the monopoly that oligarchs have over the oil market, terrorism and inequality etc. I sketched out ideas playing with different concepts eventually making a few in Illustrator but nothing seemed right. The problem was the use of colour and shape. The tone of voice in the book is incredibly serious and Noam speaks with confidence and is incredibly articulate. Nothing he says is made fancy or is jazzed up, which made me want to create an incredibly simple design. I decided to create an all black book cover, as the connotations of black being power, death, elegance and oil are all perfect. I added a slice going up to represent the diminishing oil and rising prices. The top half was foiled (all be it poorly after I was sold the incorrect binding glue), and the bottom half was matte. I chose Helvetica for the type (light and bold) due to it’s connotations with capitalism. I was very happy with my final design even though the actual exhibited piece didn’t come out as expected. The concepts I felt were intelligent and led to a smart outcome. I definitely believe the cover suited the tone of voice and topics in the book and it would work very well commercially. The audience for the book is mainly students who are studying political philosophy and people who know his name. His book sold very well even though the original cover was horrendous, so I think this book cover could expand the potential target audience to people who wish to learn more about society but are more influenced by things such as the book cover. The exhibition was very good and I was impressed with the work that the first year created. It certainly motivated to step up my game for 3^rd year and possibly do some cross-year collaborations.