Little Brown Book Project - Working Progress

A few weeks into the project and here is whats what. There have been a lot of different designs going on, just playing around with different approaches and methods.

For this, I drew a picture of the USA and used a characterful type, it's probably a bit simple, but simple is simple for a reason, it works in it's own way. It's sometimes nice to start again on a white piece of paper and start from scratch.

It's fun to get carried away with bikes!

Tried to work with bigger imagery but it looks a bit too much like someone projectile vomited a premature version of a final design onto here.

Little Brown Book - Feedback

I have shown my work to Little Brown Publishing and they were quite surprised by the work of everyone. Their advice to me was to continue to work with shape and try to forge a concept of using the whole page (front, back and middle), as they particularly would like to see imagery that fills the whole page and not just separate to the front or back, this is an idea I agreed with as I have done this in the past for projects such as The Wind in the Willows, where I have used the double page to plant a whole scene.

They also recommend I work with a Graphic Design student to combine a suitable typeface with my designs, I don't always like working with others as I feel I can think better in my own head and like to think I'd be fine finding a good typeface, but having someone else to bounce ideas and combine thoughts is always good and it will be interesting to work with someone I don't know and hasn't had the same design experience. 

I am going to continue to think about the layout of the page and how this can be used to an advantage, instead of sticking to just using each page separate. I also think that if I use shape in each design and stick to my style, I will have automatically kept the synergy going and that will be the common basis for the 7 designs. 

Little Brown Book Publishing - Basic Designs

After spending some time on forging a few ideas for the Little Brown Book Publishing brief, I have come up with a few designs for several books. I am trying to create a synergy between the books, but not keep them too similar, because they are not a 'collection' but a series of books, and so I want them each to be very different but keep a design consistency throughout.

The last design 'A Ride in the Neon Sun' has taken inspiration from one of my pieces I did earlier in "The Wind in the Willows", I kept the idea of using transparency to give a 3d effect of distance in the image. These are all just very basic starts, but I will gradually introduce detail and use my own drawings in the imagery.

I am going to show these to the Little Brown Book Publishing agency when they visit and see what they think to the ideas.

Little Brown Book Project, Initial Ideas and Thought Processing

Trying to come up with a few starting points for book designs for Little Brown Book Publishing, the Josie Dew character seems to be very funny and spontaneous, so I had an idea of making her bike look ridiculous as I could imagine her to be carrying lots of luggage and have a basket with lots of items shoved in, like buckets and spades, sleeping bags and umbrellas.

I have also started to implement the typeface I made, but it doesn't seem to be working too well, making a typeface is quite difficult and seems to look better on paper as an alphabet than put with a design. Going to continue to work on these and play around more with shape.