One Day Brief: Marber Grid

Today we were a one day brief to create a new set of 3 book covers using photographs of a 3D collage/scene, the images that we used to collage with had to be images from the work we created over Christmas. The images were manipulated to make them 3D ;this could be a representational ‘scene’ or something more abstract. I chose to use images of my visual poetry work and my excel drawings as I felt that they were the most successful, however in the end I chose to only use my excel drawing images for the book covers.

I experimented with a few different ways of collaging for this brief; I combined my visual poetry and excel drawings to create contrast between the typography and blocks of colour, I also interlocked the imagery but cutting holes and shapes into my excel drawings and then putting the visual poetry imagery in between. I then also used my excel drawings to create a dramatic scene, I tried to make the scenes look childlike as well as dramatic, this was the most successful experiment.

I managed to create 8 different book covers, I felt that some worked better than others; the threshold covers worked better than the 2 Aladdin covers. Overall, I felt that the covers weren't as successful as i'd hoped they'd be, mainly because of the very short time that I had. I think that if I had more time I would of been able to plan better and spend more time refining, the photographs would also be more experimental. The 3 book covers that I think work best as a set are the threshold covers with the one opacity layer on top.

We then had a silent critique of our book covers. I received some useful feedback;

• Single colours work really well- the vibrancy is very eye catching
• Breaking up the images relates to pixelated style- maintains a geometric/broken style
• Most effective with white banner at the top- makes the title stand out more
• Has a childlike style because of the excel images/colour- lends itself well to target audience; children
• Looks almost game like- lends itself well to nature of books; fiction
• Imagery is strong and makes the books easily recognisable without reading the title
• Really interesting style
• In some images with a lot of white space and distortion, it makes you really think about what it actually is
• Interesting part is how the covers are recognisable pretty much purely from the colour scheme, so continue to use colour as a very vital element

Areas to improve;

• The covers are quite conservative. Be more experimental
• Try to push the boat out with imagery used. The style is nice but be less obvious
• The front cover of 1.psd is hard to read