Oxford University Press Book Covers
During my second year at university, members of Oxford University Press came and ran a module surrounding book cover designs, relating specifically to their ‘A very short introduction’ series. For this project we chose three book covers, from a collection, to design as a series, I went with a theme of 'Mental health', choosing ‘Depression’, ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Happiness’.
I aimed for a very striking, minimalist cover design, utilising iconography to symbolise the topics I’d chosen. My concept involved a ‘double-cover’, in which the outer cover only had colour printed on the spine, then the symbol was a cut-out revealing the second cover which was printed in full colour.
This is a university project that I achieved a first in.
Symbols
With the concept being so simple for this book cover, I felt it necessary for the symbols to be absolutely perfect. To achieve this the symbols needed to look visually pleasing on their own, work as a set together and represent their respective book’s title. These symbols went through a lot of iterations in development and I eventually settled on a punctuation theme for the set to connect them all.
The symbol for depression being the semicolon (;) felt fitting as the symbol is very representative of suicide awareness.
The symbol for depression being the semicolon (;) felt fitting as the symbol is very representative of suicide awareness.
Spine
I wanted to keep the books’ ‘brand colours’ in mind when it came to the spine. As the spine is the only part of the book that is visible for 90% of its lifetime while it sits on a shelf, keeping it visually interesting somewhat and also reinforcing the covers’ colour.
This led me to setting the title that appears on the spine in the respective books’ colour, to have it stand out from the rest of the text on the spine while also making the spine more interesting and reinforcing the ‘brand colour’.
This led me to setting the title that appears on the spine in the respective books’ colour, to have it stand out from the rest of the text on the spine while also making the spine more interesting and reinforcing the ‘brand colour’.
Development