Development of Typography

The main aspect that I wanted to focus on with this cover was the typography. I think a really simple Illustration with muted colour spectrum and limited details combined with a well designed, slick and iconic piece of typography will work really well to create a very uniform, flowing cover that still packs a punch. I have developed the typography over time and it has gone through two major evolutions. The first was an experiment with the 3D tools in Adobe Illustrator:

One of the main things I wanted to have was the word "BIG" being the biggest thing on the page. This would really help give meaning to it and really help it to stand out. After a bit of experimentation I ended up with this. This was before the pitch however, so I was also still finalising colour schemes and font faces. The idea was for the word to look large, ornate and of the upper classes. I thought it really gave power to the word and emphasised subtle meanings and themes within the title and the book. It however, didn't really work. with a simplistic colour spectrum with little to no detail in any of the images a serif font of such size and depth would look really out of place. The colours were also obviously grossly unfit for purpose as a crime thriller is all about subtlety and mystery and smokey, cold tones; orange completely destroys those themes. The main success with this was with the Jessica Hische inspired smoke typography I created:

I created it by creating a load of lines each with only a white stroke then drawing a smokey shape with the pen tool and using the "envelope distort" function in Illustrator to combine the two. I then was left with the original smokey shape looking like some actual smoke which I then made into an art brush. Once I had done this I could then use the pencil and indeed brush tool to draw out letters and shapes onto my designs and would be left with a very realistic and aesthetically breathtaking effect. I hand wrote the word "Sleep" quickly with the pencil tool and experimented with the line size and opacity to see which worked best but it was basically good to go from the second the brush was applied. The idea I had to have the work "Sleep" written in gun or cigarette smoke suddenly became a reality as I knew I could pull it off in a realistic and aesthetically accomplished manor.

I then carried both the lessons I learnt with the word "BIG" and the technique I learnt from the word "Sleep" and combined the two to create my final piece of typography:

This is much more effective and striking! The colours are a lot more subdued than in the first example and and the Jessica Hische inspired calligraphy is more refined and aesthetically pleasing. This is everything I wanted it to be and more and is definitely striking, prominent and iconic.