THE CHEESE MONKEYS BOOK COVER

& FRONT MATTER

Kevin PorterART 051

4/8/15

After the second critique, I reevaluated how my fish should look. I thought the derpiness of the fish was just awesome but I was informed its design did not go with how the fish was described in the novel so I reread that part of the book and changed it to a more tiny, scared, opalescent fish. To add to the oddness, I made the fish more anthropomorphic, and made it attempting to leap out of the bowl. I thought it looked awesome.

In the cheese Monkeys, the main character says how he hates art but changes his mind in a sense when he take a graphic design course which differentiates design from art. The tone I feel the cover should have is somewhat quirky. I found the entire novel to be odd and quirky. I was just an odd book that did not seem to have a distinct plot that I could tell.

The imaginary typography that came to mind was bold and odd. This is mostly due the nature of the graphic design teacher during the critiques. This is also due to what the teacher said about design. He said that design is meant to get the viewers attention which is exactly what a book cover is supposed to do.

Originally I did not know what I was going to do for my cover. I knew for sure I did not want to include cheese or monkeys in the cover because that is way too cliche. Everyone would want to put cheese and monkeys on the cover even though the book wasn’t about cheese or monkeys. I mean thee actual cover has cheese and monkeys on it for crying out loud.

Because my art style is very graphic and cartoony I wanted to incorporate that into my cover. My favorite of the initial sketches where the ones of the fish in the bowl I just really liked the look on the fish’s face.

After the first critique, I decided to go with the fish book cover but I adjusted the placement of the text and pictures to go with the Fibonacci sequence.

I also decided to change the background to a more pale gray so the image and text will be the primary focus of the cover.

I really liked the blue outline of the text too. This was completely unintentional but I thought it strongly resembled the title logo for the Sega video game franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, which made me like it even more. I was ad-vised to change it though so I did. I still like the outline but what can you do?

I also decided to change the font of the text to a more hand-written style font to make increase the odd levels. I felt like something that looks handwritten on the cover of a novel is off putting so I went with it.

The yellow font was really hard to read on the gray background so I changed it to a dark blue like the color of the spine.

After that I messed with the placement of the handwrit-ten text to go with the Fibonacci sequence between. I also adjusted the placement of the block of text on the back cover because I felt it was not very centered. I added the UPC code and the authors name on the spine as well.

FINAL BOOK COVER

I based a lot of my layout style on how the typog-raphy book was laid out. I wanted to keep it clean and concise. There was not much more I based it on.