So you'd think I'd be ok at book cover designing since as editorial designers we strive to tell the story. Well when the book isn't exactly a story it makes it a bit more difficult. Actually, a lot more difficult.
I picked the book without art because I wanted to push myself to come up with solutions for the lack of visual representation for the book. I'm still pretty confused about what the book is actually about because the description is very academic. Like I said though, I like the history of the South and its politics/development, so I thought I'd be interested enough in the topic to help me figure out a solution.
So since the book is more of a thesis than a story, I wanted to make a nice, clean typographic cover, like a textbook-ish kind of looking, but more visually appealing. I couldn't really figure out a good way to illustrate cultural conservatism, so I tried to think of how my books from the class I had looked and how I like the way just type covers with bold colors look. I realize a lot of my designs were just because I couldn't think of anything, so I just threw some shapes and colors together. But a lot of them I tried to represent southern cultural conservatism in my type choices. Lots of serifs, traditional looking. Reds and oranges. Red, white and blue. I never thought I'd be the person who needed to do 20 more designs to actually get somewhere, but I'm glad I found that out now instead of later.
I need to sit down and re-evaluate my approach because obviously it wasn't working. I need something more representative for a book cover. I have to find the story within this piece of academic work to illustrate on the cover. I wish there was a Google translate for superfluous language (see what I did there...cuz the book is Superfluous Southerners?). Anyway, with that said, I'll probably have 3-5 totally different ideas for Tuesday because I'm not particularly proud of anything that I did.
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