Part 2 Exercise Book Cover Design

I know nothing of HG Wells work so I looked online and found a list of his books. With the internet it is relatively easy to identify which novels were "social" and there is a plot summary available but if I was to create a cover design I think I would need to at least skim read the novels to get a feel for the style and flavour. HG Wells wrote between 1895 and 1941 so some research on the fashions of the era of the individual novels would help to get a feel of the background though if the novels are to be republished maybe a more modern flavour would attract new readers. I would try to identify common themes and ideas for the three books as if they are to work as a set the covers should work together.
I assume that as only three books are chosen from his entire catalogue they have something in common or work together in some way. For example "Wheels of Chance"(1896), "Ann Veronica" (1909) and "Christina Alberta's Father"(1925) cover the same period as the Suffragettes and deal with independent women and older men. I think they would work together and could be linked with the suffragettes theme which would need researching.
Primary research would be to read the novels (or synopses) and look at the era through books, the internet and if time permitted museums, eg. the Geffrye museum in London has mock ups of living rooms of different periods and could give a lovely background. Secondary research maybe to read other peoples views of HG Wells and the novels and to look at past covers. Also to look at "Contemporary" book covers to see what is in fashion at the moment. Looking at the top 20 bestsellers and "hot" new releases on Amazon Contemporary seems to mean primarily lettering with a semi abstract background. Such as Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl"

 and although I prefer the cover of "Diary of a Dog walker" it looks more dated to me

Research lead me to the work of Lizzie Bass
http://lizziebass.electrofolio.com/en/b1/work-#/slideshow.2

I'm a little unsure how far I'm supposed to go with this exercise so I checked other students blogs and the interpretation seems very varied. I looked at images that I felt gave me a feel of the era.

 I particularly like the Votes for Women poster, but I don't think they count as contemporary.


1) Wheels of Chance

 I used a bicycle wheel and manipulated the image on the computer

 This book also involves a journey across the south of England so maybe a map could be used on the cover

 Which could be distorted.......

I quite like the final distortion but overall I think the wheel has more going for it as an idea


2) Ann Veronica

Ann Veronica is a biology student who is restricted by her father. I thought that trees and plants would represent her ideals of freedom and independence so I chose a snapshot from my phone

which I manipulated with  Paintshop

I like these two ideas best but actually chose the image on bottom left for my final cover as I think it fitted better

Though I don't know that they have anything in common with the pictures from Wheels of chance except that they are manipulated photos. My idea was to use them as background and maybe try and unify the books with lettering style.

 

 

3) Christina Alberta's Father

 



The third book is Christina Alberta's Father Mr Preemby, one of the characters believes that he is the incarnation of Sargon the ancient King of Sumeria so I Googled Sargon and amongst the many ideas I saw I came upon this lovely image

 taken by the Iranian photographer Rasoul Ali www.rasoulali.com

 

So my suggested covers are using copperplate gothic light because it looks a bit like the typeface for Suffrage Science in my moodboard 

They don't look very contemporary to me so I'm not sure that I have fulfilled the brief. I think I needed to work on the books together and to look at lettering and typography alongside looking for images. With good layout and typography maybe images weren't needed.

 

I tried doing Ann Veronica a bit differently

These would need different coloured lettering (maybe embossed?) to make them stand out. They look more contemporary.

Wheels of Chance could then become;

I think I'm struggling a bit with Christina Alberta's Father because I don't know enough about the book. Going back to my ideas I considered bubbles for the laundrette

but this is very difficult to read and although I could research different interpretations of bubbles I don't think it works for me with the concept I have of the story.

Therefore I tried  drapes which I interpret as curtains though in 1925 when the book was first published drapers were fabric merchants. I took a photo of my curtains which are actually white but gained an interesting cast in the evening light

and then added the titles to a section of this

I think this is much more contemporary. If it was going for publishing I would maybe choose a different fabric image.

For the spine of all covers I would wrap the image around to cover it and run the title etc. along the spine which isn't ground-breaking I know but I think the information on the spine should be clear and simple to allow the reader to easily identify the book.

 

 

Some of my references;

The wheels of chance
http://cambridgeforecast.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/the-wheels-of-chance-hgwells-novel-on-social-changes-from-bicycle-1890-1905/

Wheels of Chance (1896): This is the aforementioned satirical bicycling romance. It’s hard now to understand and take seriously just how threatened the bastions of Victorian England were by the invention of the bicycle. They saw people who they felt had no right to travel charging around on the roads at what seemed like dizzying speeds. Even worse, velocipedes were embraced by women, something which involved the exposure of feminine legs or even women wearing trousers. Surely society was about to collapse! Wells’s sweet novella follows the bicycling travels of the three members of a love triangle. It is one of his earliest and funniest looks at the aspirations and pretensions of the lower-middle class (a theme he’d return to in Kipps and The History of Mister Polly, among others).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheels_of_Chance

Ann Veronica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Veronica