Drafts

I finished making my drafts and have asked people for feedback. I was initially planning to conduct my own photo-shoot to use for my designs and use stock photos to get a sense of what I want to feature in my photos. However, because of the limited amount of time that I had and also lack of props and the right models, I was not able to do my own photo-shoot and resulted to using stock photographs, which I found in Google images and Deviantart, an online art community where artists share their works and resources. All of the photos that I found are free for personal use however, most images needs to be credited and so I made sure that I did (see bibliography). Deviantart was a very valuable site for me as it also provided me with other resources that I needed to create the book covers in Photoshop such as the brushes.

Feedback participants

I tried to keep the people who gave me feedback the same as the ones who answered my survey to keep my results consistent. However, this was not possible because some of the people who took my survey were anonymous and also, some were not able to do them because they are busy. However, I still felt that I got a good set of results as I asked my peers, some of my survey participants and also asked my cousin in the Philippines to ask her friends if they could give me feedback. I wanted to let people have freedom when giving feedback on my drafts and not feel too constricted with giving them a set of answers or tick boxes like my survey. I carried out an open-ended research and asked them for their opinions on all of my drafts and they wrote to me what they thought.

Designs

The very first design that I created was simple. I originally intended to use my own photo for this design (see above) however, I ended up focusing on the logo on the flap of the dust jacket. This design was the most unpopular from the feedback that I got and a lot of people stated that it looked ‘boring’. My second design is the second most popular because of the details that I added in the background and looks a lot more interesting than the plain, gradient background in my first draft. In my third draft, I decided to stray away a bit from my main theme colour, black and red and only included them on the logos and the text. I made most of the colour of the dust jackets white (i.e. the main book cover image and the background) to parallel the control and false sense of peace found in my dystopian novels. I used stock photographs because again, I was planning on doing my own photo-shoot. However, since the design was not popular amongst my target audience I decided not to continue on with it. My fourth was the most popular out of all my drafts. It mainly features the font ‘Ontwerp’ at the front cover of my design, which is also used at the back cover of my second design. The font was very popular amongst my feedback participants and so I decided to use it predominantly in my final designs. The abstract and hand drawn images and logos that I did also received very positive feedback and most participants said that they would like to see them on a dust jacket. The logos reminded them a lot of the ‘Hunger Games’ and Divergent’ book covers, which they highly suggested me to look at and take inspiration from. This suggestion was the main reason why I did not continue on with my fifth design, which I was working on at the time I was getting my feedbacks. I think that the spine of my fifth design looked very interesting and complies with the findings that I found in my research. However, since my feedback participants wanted me to use the logo as my font cover image, I decided not to use them on the spine as they would look repetitive if I did. Furthermore, because of the limited time that I had creating the designs, I was not able to draw or think of more images that I can use as replacement. However, I still focused on the spine by making its typography look interesting through the use of textures, logos and by carefully placing the background to add detail to it.

2.1

4.1

2.2

3.1

3.3

3.2

4.2

4.3

2.3

1.1

1.3

1.2

f451 5.21

5.3