Covered: Designing the Cover

After trying the suggestions in the crit I have really struggled to get all the sheep (front and back) to aline correctly. If they are in a straight row then the back ones don't work around the box text box. If I line them up with the text box then they go over the page and if I remove the outer ones the edges become un equal. Any way I try it doesn't work, however Vanessa suggested that I create more of a dust cover for a hard back book rather than a softback cover. This would make things a lot easier as it meant I could put all the information on the side flaps and continue the pattern neatly on the back.

Before I start designing the sides I have found a list of things that can and/or should be included on the book. In the brief it says a completed jacket design, so I want to know what should actually be included.

Back

•If your book will sell through retail source it will need to include a bar code generated from an ISBN# unique to your book title.

All of the other items below are optional.
• Title and subtitle of the book are optional but recommended
• Promotional text or a synopsis of the book
• Quotations from reviewers – especially if they are from recognizable sources
• Brief author biographical information – About the Author – can include small photo
• ISBN Bar Code
• Publishers name is optional or may be represented by an emblem or device (colophone)
• Publisher or author web site address
• Photographer or illustrator credit (optional or placed in tiny print along the side of the spine)

Additional for Dust Jacket:

The inside flaps of the dust jacket can be left blank – or here are a few ideas of what you can include.

Front Inside Flap:• An interesting short quotations from the book
• Photos or small images – an excellent place to carry over your design elements
• Quotations from reviewers – quotes not used on the back cover

Back Inside Flap:• Short author bio with or without a photo
• Photos or small images – an excellent place to carry over your design • Additional books by the same author with small cover images
• Cover designer or photographer credit

This list has been really helpful in deciding what to put on the book cover. I like the idea of having a bit out of the book in the very front. A bit about the Nietzsche could be useful to include especially for new readers. A review from a recognisable source would also help to promote the book.

I have already gathered some information for the book cover for my previous design:

Quote

‘What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’

The Blurb

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche’s position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a ‘slave morality’. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own ‘will to power’ upon the world.

Barcode

About 

I have copied this word for word from my version of the book.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was born in Rocken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamphlets (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more independently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the closing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later.

After writing it out, I might not actually use it. I think it could be too much text. Instead I can use:

Written in his most masterful style, full of irreverence and brio, Nietzsche dissects self-deluding human behaviour, bankrupt intellectual traditions, and the symptoms of social decadence, while at the same time advancing an extra-moral wisdom to be shared by those kindred soul who think 'beyond good and evil'.

This new translation of Beyond Good and Evil provides readers with a true classic of modernity that sums up those forces and counterforces in nineteenth-century Western Civilisation that to an astonishing degree have also determined and continue to inform the course of our own century.


Dust Jacket Experimentations

This is the first of the final book covers. It will work as a template but certain smaller elements need to be altered. The colour green is one element which needs to be sorted out. I also need to decide whether to alter the sheep so that each row alternates the direction it faces to look like below. The idea behind this is that all of the sheep are aimlessly following the one in front and on it goes. 

The flaps either side of book cover do not work well if the green is continued over. The text is hard to read in both white and black on the green. 

Using a darker colour green as the backing contrasts against the white of the sheep, the darker colour makes the pattern stronger. The darker green like the type, promotes more of a traditional book cover with the alternating pattern keeping it contemporary. I am still unsure on whether the book should be this dark but will experiment further and then ask for feedback from peers once I have a few different outcome possibilities.

The two lighter shades of green used above definitely do not work. The colour itself is quite garish especially in the areas where it has been used as a solid colour - the flaps either side. These colours don't do justice to the book and remove the idea that there are serious messages/theories running through it. The light green makes it look fun and friendly; something the book is not. The book needs to look appealing but also mature and serious, the lighter greens are ones you would find on a child's book not necessarily a mature philosophy book. The darker green before perhaps looked too serious and dull, removing an interest and intrigue from the book. The background will need to be somewhere between the two.

Above shows two different colours that could work for the book cover, I am still unsure on what colour I want to use and don't feel like either of these are completely appropriate. However this is a minor detail which can be edited later on. The sheep are now alternating for each row. The type is inline, I want to add something extra on the front flap, I think I will find another quote so the layout will almost mimic the layout of the back flap.