imagery and me

Becky began by offering a few designers and illustrators of note to research and admire:

Peter Mendelsund - Italo Calvino
This interview discusses Peter Mendelsund's design process, and it's a really interesting insight. Some of his designs are below:






















Alice Todd- The Art of Being Normal
Is a really interesting and graphic book cover. The use of colour is inspired, and I particularly like how the design continues through the book. The image really fittingly describes what the novel is about, and the cover in its entirety is very marketable and visually drawing. The endpapers are also notable for their simplicity and effectiveness.

Lisa Jones
Lisa Jones' illustration is really quite different to the content that I've previously researched, but the apparent simplicity of her design can go on to have a really impactful visual appeal. Her work is cute, colourful and graphic and fits the child-based target market really effectively with an added modern illustrative aesthetic for booksellers and parents.

The lesson covered a lot of terminology about the use of images in cover and book design, I've noted some important terms below:

Picture Rights

Rights Managed- buying exclusive rights to an image for an agreed time period

Royalty Free- anyone can download and use for free

Micro Stock- amateur photos, creative commons on websites like Flickr, Wikimedia.

Colour Printing

CYMK- Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black are the four colours that all standard colour printing is done with. Adjusting these levels can provide most colours that you would require, but not all very bright and neon colours.

RGB- Red, Green and Blue are the three colours that make up all digital images. Altering these on photoshop can give all of the different colours.

Pantones- Pantones are specialised colours that cannot be created effectively using CYMK printing. These colours can be ordered and overlaid on a book cover. Use of these colours usually adds cost.

Image Quality

72 dpi- (dots per inch) is usually fine for files that will only be viewed through a digital medium and not printed.

300 dpi- is a print quality design setting.

Some places that book designers tend to research illustrators are listed below:

• Pintrest
• Deviant Art
• Twitter
• Dictionaries
• Illustrator Directories 

To end the lesson, I tried to enhance my Photoshop skills by trying to manipulate a using an illustration of children with varying degrees of effectiveness:

 I've been working on my final project to put all of these new skills into practice.