Winding down with time and taking these moments out to post up assignments I have not posted up consolidating my posts into this one post to save sifting through a bunch of posts Visual Assignment 1 – 10 stars 3½ Stars – Minimalist TV/Movie Poster 3½ Stars – Minimalist Book Covers 3½ Stars – PSA [...]
I’m a big fan of minimalism. So, when I saw a minimalist book cover assignment in the DS106 Assignment Bank, I knew it had to happen.
I recently finished reading A Clockwork Orange, and it was more powerful than I anticipated. The book is also very dense with Burgess’ made up dialect for Alex and his gang, so I thought a minimalist cover might be a good juxtaposition with the way the book reads.
CC by Brian Bennett
My initial thought was to use a knife or a record for the cover because of Alex’s dispositions. At times, he is murderously violent, while at others, he is thoughtful and poetic, especially when he’s listening to Beethoven. However, I didn’t feel like those really carried the main theme of the novel. After some searching and some rough trial and error, I ended up using a dentist’s chair as the main image.
If you’re not familiar with the story, a chair plays a major role in Alex’s development. At first, it shows relaxation, or comfort. But, in the context of the story, it is a tool in a method of curing social disease. It is a tool where the occupant loses freedom, choice, and ultimately, self. It is a symbol of terror and carries the weight of the story along with it.
This should have been simpler than it turned out to be…it really showed me that I have to work on my understanding of layers, paths, selections, and how they all tie into one another. I began with an orange background as a base. Then, I added a layer with the original chair image. I used the eraser tool to remove a lot of the extra detail in the drawing, until I was left with the outline of the chair, with the armrest included.
Next, I converted the chair layer to a 1-bit pallet, and I used the “Select by Color” tool in GIMP to grab the outline in one click. Then, I turned the selection into a path and removed it from the layer. Finally, I changed the layer opacity to zero and put it on the background. This maintained the white fill of the chair, giving some contrast to the image.
Finally, I added the title and author using Helvetica Neue Thin font.
I’m happy with the result, and the only thing I wish I had done better was smoothing the lines of the chair. I tried using a stroke command, but I wasn’t happy with any of the results. In the long run, I decided this was good enough for now. But, I’m definitely going to go do some more research so I can improve for next time.
You can grab the image on Flickr.
Create a book cover that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.
Inspired by the Minimalist TV/Movie Poster Assignment.
I wanted to do a minimalist cover for Tales Of The City, one of my favorite book series, but I noticed that there was no minimalist book cover assignments, so I made one.
I wanted to show off the location of the books, which are set in San Francisco, and chose the Golden Gate Bridge to represent the city. I used this image and a free font that I downloaded called Aaargh and put the book cover together in GIMP while screen sharing my entire process during the Open Lab, as I was struggling with GIMP this week and unintentionally created the tutorial that way. I show up around 10 minutes in and did the entire assignment while screen-sharing in the Google Hangout.
It was my first day using GIMP and I’m slowly starting to fall in love with it, minus the issues I’m having with the font selection.
