book design

For this project we had to select an existing series of books by one authour or a set of books by from the same genre to make into a new collection. We had to redesign the covers for this series of books.

To begin with I initially planned to recreate a book series for the manga genre. Taking inspiration from the "Assassination Classroom" Created by Yusei Matsui. His mangaseries was a great suceess but another thing that made it original and unique was his book jacket designs. Each assassination classroom book cover always has the teachers facial expressions on the front.

The image on the right is the teacher and protagonist/antagonist of the series who is an alien teacher sent to teach a group of assassins to kill him, if they cant kill him he will destroy earth on their exam day.

In the series his facial expressions change depending on his mood as seen below and this is how Yusei created his front covers.

However even thought the concept was smart and creative it was too simple to create. Maybe i could've designed more covers and develop on them a bit more by experimenting with different facial expressions seen in the manga or just come up with my own.

Moving on from the manga look I went for a book that i could actually explore and experiment with so I used the maze runner. This book had a complex look because of the mazes that were actually on the book but that was the only subject on the page apart from the title. And it also does the book justice because the front cover actually have something to to with the story of the book and there is consistency of a "maze" look on each cover. I liked the use of primary colours as they are very popular and recognisable. The use of a maze on the front cover keeps you occupied as your eyes are drawn to the maze with you trying to find a oath through it even though it isn't finished which implies there are more books. 

 "Monument Valley is an indie puzzle game developed and published by Ustwo. The player leads the princess Ida through mazes of optical illusions and impossible objects while manipulating the world around her to reach various platforms."

 During my development i thought of a game on the plat store called monument valley which is about a princess that is a world full of mazes and she needs to escape but the mazes have secrets behind each turn and platforms change just like the actual maze runner series concepts.

 So taking inspiration from the existing maze runner cover and monument valley i went on illustrator and tried to make my own maze in 3-D to integrate both ideas into one.

   Second Maze concept idea.

Above is the outcome. I think here, especially the book cover I was able to experiment and break the boundaries of the normal conventions of how book covers usually look like.  I thought that making my book series one big puzzle...of three books would be creative and smart and innovative to the title of the maze runner.