Introducing Hermit Kingdom Wildfire!! This is the final version of my layout for the book cover for my Art Direction class. The assignment was to shoot a photo ourselves to present to a theoretical client to show our idea for a book layout. Upon approval of this mock-up version of the book cover, a professional photographer would then step in and perform their magic.
My hand-drawn type was inspired by 1960s album covers, specifically Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, but I also wanted it to have a sweeping, adventurous, western feel. I had so much fun creating this type. I scanned the final inked versions and image traced in Illustrator. I then pasted them as a smart object into Photoshop and applied various effects.
My original concept for the photo shoot was to have it be a crazy hippie guy who was on a spirit quest. Here are a few photos which I used for inspiration, followed by another iteration of the cover that I didn’t end up pursuing.
I learned a lot about composition of a photo for layout purposes. Mainly, that many of the photos I had taken were actually no good for a book cover because out of habit I had shot them in such a way that there was absolutely no blank space to feature the typography. Total bummer, because I got some great shots of Dustin in a shopping cart that I wasn’t able to use.
Here are some further iterations of the cover. I quite liked the first one with the bright light of the skyline bleeding into the letters, but felt that there may be readability issues so I opted to darken the type. I then decided to make the type a little bit smaller for the final version.
For the final version, I will probably revise to move the figure into the shot a little more, but I am pretty happy with how the layout turned out and look forward to doing more hand-drawn type.
Leanne Padgett 