Dust jacket

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book cover mockup on a blue background

book mockup with an optic illusion of stairs going down in black and white

 

Turtles All The Way Down Dust Jacket

Project Summary

You are asked to design and produce a dust jacket for a pocketbook novel. The measurements should not exceed (8.5” x 5.5”) and the cover should only include type with the addition of vector-based elements (no Photograph except for the author’s portrait).

Project Description

  • Cover: Title, author’s name, and Editor’s name
  • Cover Flap: Comments about the book, other publications from the same author, etc.
  • Spine: Title and author’s name. (Editor’s name is optional)
  • Propose 2 different layout options (see example below).
  • Back Cover Flap: Short biography of the author, Editor’s name, logo, and address.
  • Back Cover: Blurb summarizing the novel, bar code, etc.

Research

For this project, I used a book that I recently read. It’s a book about a young girl with OCD and she’s obsessing over everything surrounding bacteria (she’s even disgusted to swallow food.) Long story short, she falls in love, but her OCD plays a big part in her love story, and I wanted to portray that on my cover. I knew that turtles all the way down is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. That is why I drew an optic illusion of stairs going down. I only used black and white and straight lines for my project because in the book the girl likes it when everything is clean and white brings this cleanliness. I also put the title on the side so that we understand that it’s going down the stairs. On the back cover, only added it because, with the big stair in the front, I wanted the rest to breathe. It is to also emphasize the girl’s OCD by making it not cluttered and clean. In addition, the font for the body text was chosen because of its simplicity and when I look at it I feel like it is quiet. For the title font, I used this one because of its straight lines which contrasts with the body text, but I particularly chose this font because of the letter R with the little gap in in because it brings a nice effect to the design.