WONDER BOOK COVERS
colours
The colour light blue is widely used in the book covers of Wonder.
Blue in general is a colour that conveys a sense of trust, loyalty, cleanliness, and understanding and it fully expresses the themes of the story of Auggie. Blue portraits the friendship between Auggie and Summer and Jack and shows that trust and loyalty is essential in establishing friendship. Understanding is also another main theme of the story. Auggie's sister understands how Auggie should be specially being taken care of with extra devotion of their parents, Jack finally understands how friendship should be well-established, and of course people's understanding of Auggie is what we should be aware of. This explains why the colour blue is being chosen as the book cover. The blue used is a lighter blue which also dilutes the sadness that the colour blue has given and with the brighter blue, it seems that hope is being added to the colour.
A small proportion of yellow is also being used to create a contrast between the blue. It helps to attract people's attention and make the cover look more interesting and less dull.
Colour red is used in the other version of the book cover.
Red is one of the top two favorite colors of all people. There may be a reason that the illustrator would like to raise the popularity and the sales of the book as the colour red is highly awarded by people and customers. Red also captures attention it is one of the most visible colors. It also symbolises how Auggie captures people's attention by being unique and different. On the other hand, red conveys anger. Throughout the story, Auggie is being angry and hateful by his own appearance and that he doesn't like his own face.
typeface
As seen in the above photos, the designer is being clever in using the right typeface. The typeface used on the covers are mostly with a childish vibe and look like they are hand written. Some words are even being crossed out with pencil. This method of using hand written fonts is children friendly and they look like as if they were written by kids. Even with the illustration, the whole aesthetic that the cover gives is attractive to kids(target audience).
OTHER CHILDREN BOOK COVERS
It is significant that most children book covers are going for a illustration approach. The covers are often hand drawn with many different colours to catch kids' attention. Some typeface are of a hand written style to fit in the raw feeling of the drawings. While others are of a unique style that look interesting and eye-catching. The titles are always centred to make it clear and significant.
I realised that there is another style of children book covers. They are clean and going for a simplistic and minimal style. I think think is another way of attracting people's attention by only focusing on one object. Only simple outlines of the object is drawn on the covers and this is what makes them eye-catching. It is easy for people to get what the drawings are and gives people a mysterious feeling that they would like to purchase the book in order to know what happens. I believe this simplistic style not only attracts children, but also I wider range of audiences and customers. Putting myself into the book company's shoe, I believe that attracting as much customers as possible will be one of the biggest goal to achieve. Therefore, not only attracting children, but other ranges of readers is also an important point to think of. Like the book Wonder, children of course is the target audience, however, we should also consider readers of other ranges in order to maximise the sales of the book.
2018 PENGUIN'S CHILDREN'S COVER AWARD WINNERS
I also looked at last year's award winners and found out that they made good use of the typeface that they created. The cover is fully handrawn with illustrations and hand written typeface. The front and the back have words being squeezed into the drawn characters. It shows a very wise method of coperating text and images together as without the text, the image won't be formed. This wise method of placing text and images can be used in my designs for better use of space.
my design provoked by the mentioned method:
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This design made use of the method of photographing. The designer took a photo of a bunch of tied paper slips. The whole design is using the idea of placing words on the paper slips. This methods made the design looks more interesting and less boring. This design is totally different from the first one as there is no hand written or new typeface created, even element is derived from existing objects. Also, the 3 orange slips are extended to the back cover and this could be a good way to attract people's attention and curiosity to the content at the back. This method of extending elements from the front to back can be used in my own design.
my design provoked by the mentioned method:
This design is quite different from the other two. It combines hand drawn elements and digital elements well to form a cohesive visual outcome. A lot of textures are used -- ripped and folded paper, chalk, fingerprints, water marks, highlight... Although these elements seem to be raw, the digital elements worked well with them after all the editing process. This method of combining hand drawn marks and digital elements could be used in my design to create a rich textured outcome.
THE DESIGNER-- TAD CARPENTER
"You’re able to control what you want the audience to see and feel much more successfully than you might be able to with photography, for example. We create a lot of brand identity systems with illustrative backbones—illustration libraries give such flexibility to who the brand wants to become and how they want to convey a message. It allows you to approach gender, race, age, location, and various other variables in a very natural and easily digestible way."
Tad Carpenter is the designer of the Wonder book cover. He is a designer, illustrator, author and teacher. Tad has illustrated over twenty children’s books on the market today as well as designing over 200 gig posters for musicians, bands and tours. Wonder is one of the most famous covers he designed. The underlying theme is one of joy: bright colors, funny characters, and a whimsical, illustrative style. His design style heavily relies on illustration. Commenting on his own WONDER book cover design, "From the get-go we knew we wanted to have Auggie on the cover of the jacket in some way, but the challenge was how much of Auggie do we show? We believe that the book itself should be what paints the picture of this captivating character and so we approached the Wonder jacket in more abstract terms. With Auggie’s appearance being such an integral part of the Wonder story, our choice was to abstract the character as to not influence the readers’ perception of who Auggie is, while also creating a metaphor for his facial abnormality."
The idea of not showing the whole face of Auggie is interesting. Tad didn't want the cover to shape how people picture Auggie and I think is the most challenging part of design the cover. How can I create an Auggie without shaping people's perception on his appearance? Use other objects to represent Auggie? Astronaut? Planet?
MARION DEUCHAR
This design uses exactly the colours that I would like to use for the thinking bubble idea. The way how Marion placed simple drawings and text together is worth looking at. It is simple, yet eye catching.
I really like how the text filled the back cover. The drawing from the front cove was used on the back cover as well to make the whole design cohesive. This idea could be used for my thinking bubble design, with the text hand written inside the think bubble in the back cover.
