Friday, 14 October 2011

photography book cover assignment

Evaluation.

The book I chose to do, Pretty Little Liars, is targeted at teenage girls, this is one of the reasons why I picked it as I can relate to it. Pretty Little liars is a series of books 9 books written by Sara Shepard, it is also a very successful TV show, which is targeted at the same audience. There are 2 versions of the pretty little liars books, One of the versions has the actresses from the TV show on the front cover whereas the other doesn’t. So when designing my own version, I wanted to try and design a cover with the actresses and then also one without.
The whole plot of pretty little liars is based around secrets. So when I started my first attempt and was looking for an image to use, I decided to pick something relate to secrets, so I went with the ‘shhh’ gesture. I like this image as it’s simple, but is big and stands out at the same time. I decided to use the font I used as it’s simple and clear, it also has a soft feel to it, just like the image does. The colours I used are very feminine as that is who the target audience are, also the 4 main characters in the story are female. I like the colours I used as it doesn’t distract you and they all complement each other very well. I didn’t like this cover and decided not to use it for many reason. The first reason being, I forgot to include the author’s name, which is a huge mistake as every book should include the writer. Secondly, I think the back is very bland and boring; it just has writing and doesn’t really attract you in anyway. 
For my second attempt, I decided to use the actresses from the show as the main image. I wanted to try this idea as it’s completely opposite to my other design and some people may recognise the book more if the girls are on the cover other than something else. I used the colour yellow as the image itself has a slight yellow in the background so I felt it would all look good together. The font I used this time for the ‘pretty little liars’ is more like the original book, but personally I don’t like this font as I feel its associated with older people where as the target audience is teenagers. The reason I didn’t use this idea was because I feel there is a tad too much going on around the image, I feel If I had used a different picture then maybe it would have worked better, but as it is I feel it looks slightly unprofessional and cheap, which isn’t the look I would like to achieve.
My final and finished design is pretty much the same as my first attempt. The main image and the colours are the same; the things that are different are the font, the back page design and including the author. I decided to change the font as I feel this font is in-between the original and the font I tried first. It looks formal and it is simple and stands out, but it is still young and doesn’t have the old fashioned association with it. I decided to use a burgundy red colour as I feel it works well with all the other colours on the page and it also nearly matches the colour of the ladies lips. I decided to put a faded grey box over the ‘pretty little liars’ one of the reason I done this was so that the text didn’t get lost in the image, but I also feel it could represent the whole ‘secret’ idea as it’s almost like the text is hiding behind something and isn’t has bright and bold. On my first attempt I felt the back page was fairly boring, so I just decided to add a simple oval shape of colour, I didn’t want to put a big image on the back that would distract you from the text, so I stuck with something simple. Overall I am happy with my final design, If there was anything I would have done differently that would probably have been try out more main images, but overall I am happy with this image as it represents to book extremely well and it’s fairly obvious what the book with contain just by looking at the image.

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