Meg White

Development & Final Product

For the final design I decided that it would be far more effective and true to the quote if the whole cover was the glass ceiling, and you can only tell it's a glass ceiling as there's bird poo all over the cover.

Tutorial Feedback

Following some feedback from my tutorial, while my feedback was mostly good I was thinking about how I could make my glass ceiling look more like a glass ceiling rather than a window. I thought that I needed to have a new photoshoot of some new glass ceilings to see maybe if I could get a better effect with a different photo.

Book Cover Layout Experiments

Photo Editing Experiments

Trail 1:

I decided against this version as I thought the photo was a bit too busy and there were too many angels and edges to be able to put type coherently on it.

Trial 2:

This was the trial where I experimented with how bright to make the sky, and also with the size and placement of the bird poo. I decided to go with more of a 'splattered' bird poo in the end as I thought it was more effective than just a small round bit. I also really wanted to play around with the type to give it perspective to go with the way the view is looking up at the ceiling at the skylight.

Trial 3:

This is the image and the edited version of the photo I ultimately went with to start experimenting with book cover layouts. I added shading and editing to the bird poo to make it look like it is embossed on the flat page.

“It's difficult to see the glass ceiling because it's made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly.”  This is a quote from 'How To Be a Woman' that particularly stood out to me, particularly because it encompasses Moran's writing style perfectly.

I thought that it would be very interesting to experiment with photographing a real 'glass ceiling' for the front cover.

I decided I would like to experiment with photography and take photographs of an actual 'glass ceiling', as I thought metaphorically it would work and be effective, but I also wanted to experiment with geometric photography.

Here is the mood board I created for the shoot:

Here is the contact page for the shoot:

Research into potential books

My first thought was that I really wanted to research into the children's books to see whether any of them gave me any ideas. I really enjoyed doing children's branding with my RSA brief so I thought this would be something that would appeal to me and look coherent in my portfolio.

James and the Giant Peach

I love the book James and the Giant Peach and thought it would be really lovely to illustrate a cover for this, but I don't think I would be able to move past my love for Quentin Blake's illustrations or think of an idea that would be better or more successful.

The Outsiders

The Outsiders was an interesting choice for me also, I'd never heard of the book but through research I thought it had a lot of interesting themes, such as class divide, honour and integrity and the cycle of violence. I thought that the cover would be very successful if it was brought to the modern day through a poignant piece of photography.

I also had a look at the non-fiction books, because I thought that a non fiction book could have a quite successful cover through experimenting with something conceptual and thematic.

How To Be a Woman

How To Be a Woman is a memoir/'rant' of Caitlin Moran's experience as a woman, and her opinion that every woman (and man) should call themselves a feminist... because why on earth would you not. Her writing is very flippant, funny and blunt humour about a topic people usually are uncomfortable talking about. In an interview done by NPR, Moran says that she uses humour in her writing because "it's kind of hard to argue with someone who's making you laugh".

Final Presentation

New app pages

Tutorial Feedback

Forager's Box/kit

For the kit, I decided to actually photograph the box rather than try and make a mock up of each individual piece as having a photograph would look infinitely better.

I took 113 photos in various placements and settings to show off the contents of the bag. After using lightroom, these are the ones I chose as the best after editing them:

I decided to go with the last one as I actually thought it looked better without the box and having everything out on display was nicer as you can see everything included nicely.

Third draft of app design

Second draft of app design

This is the first design of the Little Forager's app.

This is the base version I did with just getting down what each page was going to be about, but I needed to do some app design research in order to make it look a lot better and a lot more user friendly.

I started with this useful article.

For specifically children's app design, I read this article.

Apps I used for research for my own foraging app.