18/05/2021: cover design and text.

 I came up with a few different design ideas for the cover of my book after deciding to use the name 'Nature explorers'. Initially I wanted to call the book 'Exploring Habitats' but decided that the concept of 'habitats' might be  to complex for young audiences to understand. I wanted the viewer to feel as though they were exploring lots of wildlife as the book features lots of close up shots of wild life. The business of some of the pages almost allows the viewer to actively search for all the insects and flowers within each section. 

After creating these roughs, I decided that design number 5 looked the best for the cover, although I really liked the ones that featured the notepad too.

 

When creating the front cover on photoshop I decided to include a small ode to the notebook idea by making hand written text for the title on paper from one of my own notebooks. I really like the added touch of found papers collaged within my work to give and element of physicality to the work. The work is largely texture orientated through the use of my own painted papers that I used in making all of the images - the cover nicely ties all of this together.

I decided to go back and make some amendments to the cover design. I felt like it was missing some foliage and that the light house wasn't working as part of the landscape at the bottom. Following this, I added some more leaves and replaced the light house with a barn which I feel fits the image much more nicely now. This also shows a different perspective to the the introductory page to the farm land section of the book which features the same barn and bird in the tree with its nest. I think this is a subtle correlation to the imagery inside the book and it works as a front cover. I also decided to re-work the hand written title as it needed to flow better and I think that I have achieved this now as the letters look more uniform and angular.

I decided to further re work the text for the cover as it still didn't flow in the way that I intended it to.

 

I selected the best letters from my experiments and finally put together the words in a way I felt satisfied with as they appear more coherent.

 

Below is the third version of my cover. I think that the banner like title is really starting to work now. I spent a while experimenting and altered the text to a standard I felt happy with. I felt as though the banner needed to have more angular lines rather than just being two rectangles so I also changed this. In addition to this I also tucked part of the banner behind the birds tail and angled the leaves o the top right to point more inwards draw attention to the title.

The next day I decided to re work the word explorers again because I wasn't happy with it still. I didn't like that the letters felt like they were all different thicknesses and that the flow still felt off. I adjusted this and ended up with an outcome that felt so much better and had a nicer flow to it.

Below is the final version with the amended explorers text.

Text within a picture book is something that I have little experience with. I made sure to do lots of research so that I had a clear idea of how I wanted to format the text. For the sake of the dummies, I will be using Loren Ipsum text as a guideline for where I would place the actual text within the image. In preparation for the degree show, I plan of writing text for my most successful images and then eventually I will write the whole book.

I watch various YouTube tutorials on how to align text and make sure that it wouldn't be cut off if it was placed too close to the edge f the page.

I also referred to a couple of my own books as inspiration for the text format I would use.

The first book I referred to was A first Book of Nature by Mark Hearld. I made sure to leave blank spaces in the images where I would place the text. If the area was light, I would make the text a dark colour which would be uniform throughout the light spaces in the book. I also chose to centre align my text in the same way that he does with double spacing between lines.

Here is an example where I have done this:

For text that will sit on darker backgrounds, I used a white colour for the text to insure that It would show up clearly on the page. Here is an example by Mark Hearld followed by an example from my book: