Overall

I enjoyed creating these book designs. At the start I was hoping too much of creating 10 book covers in the space of time that I had, but from minimizing it down to 5 then to 3 to work on I produced something that is portfolio worthy. I learned new techniques for presenting book covers from using a mock up and I know what I want to do in future, which is advertising and illustration.

Originally I wanted to create minimalism for the books. That idea changed to symbolism after designing the "Watership Down" cover as I enjoyed making the black rabbit in the Rabbits pupil. It can give some sort of the story away without telling and would make readers want to read it. The black rabbit is basically the rabbit death god in their tribe. As most rabbits are fearful of trespassers, new environments and survival, the black rabbit is mention numerous times in the film and book. This gave me the idea of having the black rabbit as the pupil in the eye, to show that the rabbits are staring at death everytime, everyday.

This also helped when designing "The Last Unicorn" as I wanted something thats not just a unicorn. By creating a Unicorn skull from a real horse skull and adding the horn it shows loneliness, extinction, death and isolation. In the book no one has seen the unicorns for centuries including the main character, who is a unicorn. When people meet her they are shocked, amazed and sad knowing that she might be the last one. Skulls in museums or in history are shown for extinction of an animal and this ties in well with the theme

For the final book, "The Doomspell" it was a hard book to interpret as symbolism without revelaing the character. I have read the book loads of times and decided to use the eye as symbolism again. There are loads of eye in the book (Witches eye, the eye tower, children s eyes, buttons that are eyes) but I wanted something different. What striked me the most is that when a child in the bok has magic, their iris's change colour for using that spell, e.g. blue for flying, brown for killing curse, yellow for glow, etc. Instead of using just one colour I used different colours and gradients for the eye. The main character, Rachel, can have loads of spells and her eyes at the end have multicolored. This shows strength, power and mystery with just having one eye in the black background with nothing else to give away.

I want to keep on researching book designs in the summer and different mock ups for different medias such as leaflets, posters and even postcards. I enjoyed this class and finally have something for my final portfolio, which I am very happy for.