Do judge a book by its cover: Robots!

New Brief time! This one concerning the creation of a sleeve for a book from a specific selection at the Uni's library.  This time there were no restrictions on media and colour, just have at it. The only other expectation outside the blog posts and actual outcome, was to have five roughs to the scale of the book, so what was the book i found for my project?

Robots, by Daniel Ichbiah

To summarise, its a book, about robots.

Idea draughtsmanship

Starting off in a rather daft manner, i committed to my outcomes far too early with two detailed drawings (the robotic forearm and heart), that I was pretty certain wouldn't be used in the actual outcome, silly stuff. Whilst this was a poor use of time, at least they made for decent Instagram posts, so theres that i guess.

After this i got straight to thinking of a design layout, a little robot fella jumping. The priority for this idea was to both create a character of my own, and also have the robot jumping from the constraint of wiring, to show how far we have come within the technological genre. Feeling the first rendition of the character was a bit stiff (the blue and orange sketch), i experimented with poses to achieve a better fluidity. These can be seen dotted around the page. The final pose, which was a tweak of the original was later used in the full scale draught.

Again, continuing to play with different layouts, it took a while for anything to stick. I was feeling particularly inspired after looking through the '47th publication design annual: the best magazine design photography illustration infographics & digital' by the 'Society of Publication Designers'. 

   This image is titled 'Fast Company' by Alice Alves  

Whilst this didn't exactly pay off, as you can see the floaty robot text idea didn't go very far. This isn't a reason to stop my self from looking at other sources of inspiration though, as my productivity did increase when i finished with my library books, finding the scope and range of the work on show to be incredibly inspirational. The next idea, showing hands working on the well known 'Asimo' robot over complicated the cover for me, too many elements. Having used an existing real robot for an idea, i decided to have a little doodle with my favourite existing fictional robot, 'The Iron Giant', and must admit, for a small bit of fun, i like how the idea was shaping up.

Moving on, i drew a 'transformer' that was within the book, just a fun little exercise. Returning to original character/ robot design on the right hand page, i had an idea for a layout that would showcase three differing aspects of robotics, these being fictional, toy and industrial. Fictional was super fun, having one of the newer model CCTV cameras that are concealed with a dome, and can point in any direction, as my starting point for the head, the rest of the body fell in place being generated from my imagination. The other two were pretty easy, considering that a wind up robot looks like a wind up robot, and an industrial arm looks like an industrial arm. 

To explain the colour choice, i simply wanted to see how the contrasting tones work when paired with one another as line work, its nice, but probably wouldn't work out for a final outcome, i guess its a nice way to keep things interesting whilst generating concepts.

Draughting

Having a few ideas under my belt, i was eager to jump in to the larger draughts that would fit the book itself. To start things off i utilised the designs just covered. Happy with the drawing itself, but there were a lot of problems , being lazy, i used felt pens for colour, even though i knew they wouldnt give me the colour tones i wanted. This resulted in garish colours, but, i wasnt too cut up about it as having each element a different colour made the image more crowded than necessary. On top of this, seeing a somewhat finished version of this idea, i know i don't want to use it , it simply wasn't doing it for me

Next i returned to the previous designs, but wanted to present them in a more streamlined manner. Removing the production arm, and having the other two designs bundled/ interacting to make the one image, this made for a much easier image to take in. The text also drowned in the previous draught (most likely because of the harsh blue felt pen) so i re sized it giving it a more prominent position, and mentioning the felts, i decided to keep them at a minimum, sticking to the orange fine liner for the characters, and using the blue felt to create a border. Im happy with the image, it solves all the issues of the previous idea, buuuut, i still don't see it as an outcome.

Working on what i considered a throwaway thumbnail at its time of creation, i fancied drawing the iron giant, and had a ton of fun with it too. Im surprised by how much i like the result, but was uncomfortable with using a design that wasn't of my own creation. On a side note, i guess i bothered my arse to whip out the pencil crayons, giving a better idea of how i would like the colour to look in the outcome, so note to self, don't be lazy.

Saying that is quite ironic though considering this outcome is pretty much nothing.. But, there is a reason for its inclusion, being that it made me consider the spread of the cover as a whole which i used within the next draught.

Here it is, the design i knew i had to continue, and my earliest concept, the jumping robot, using the re positioned version from the posing tests, giving for a more dynamic outcome. Id hoped that changing the pose would make the image completely click for me, but i knew there was more to be done.

Finalising the final for a final outcome

I started with a bit of colour play, and yes, you probably noticed that i did this on the old, original design. This was a bit of a mistake, i think i just had that file open at the time i decided to experiment, so more the fool lazy me, regardless, i decided that i would rather have CCTV robot be the star of the show, and that these colours were not the right option.

Damn thats better, the posing is more energetic, the wires flexing all over the place are more dynamic and are far better at drawing the eye. Now i was ready to really get stuck in with colour.

Here as a handy dandy slice of the new age, i present the better results of my play in a gif. All results are shown individually below if you happen to be allergic to cool things.

I found it incredibly hard to determine which outcome i favoured, so i condensed what was really grabbing me into the top line, and, despite all the research, it seemed that the orange and blue was still what i wanted, so i nipped to the shop and got some coloured paper.

Just to be sure i liked how the colours looked with each other, i scanned the sheets in and was relieved to see that they looked good. This effort was also quite convenient as it meant i could work upon it when testing type.

Type

Unlike the colour variations, it was obvious to me what the strongest outcome was, being the outcome with the o surrounding the robots head, but also believed the final attempt with the title resting on the robots shoulder to also be quite strong.

Bit of an overthought, but i realised that i hadn't actually tried the shades of blue the other way around, and thankfully, after doing so, found the result to be far better than the original, so clearly the way to go.

This was also very advantageous for the title of the book, with the black text being easier to distinguish atop the darker shade of blue.

With that i still hadn't decided for sure what my text placement would be, so i thought it best to see the designs laid out within an actual book sleeve draught, adding the authors name too.This helped for sure, as i came to the conclusion that the second design was the way to go, but also that the placement for the authors name on the first image would be better suited. With that being said, it was time to bring this thing in to the real world.

Almost done!

So, cutting time, the process was simple enough, i had no issues with the draught illustration, so i decided to continue using it. Transferring the line work by tracing paper, and cutting out. I continued to do so with the rest of the elements of the design, being the wires and reverse (which will be seen in the final outcome when the design was decided upon at the last minute... just being honest with you.) This isnt the case for the text though, as i knew it would be inpossible to cut the perfect O's of the title, so i decided to ink them.