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Some Books I Read as a Kid and Their Evolving Styles

Since the book cover I am designing is primarily aimed at kids, I thought I should look at some of the books I read as a child. I have to admit, I have never been a big reader, most of the books I read were influenced by what my sister read as a kid too. However every now and then I will be engrossed by a novel, it just is quite rare. 

One big one was The Sweet Valley books, a long running series of books that followed the lives of identical twin sisters Jessica and Elizabeth, spanning from their young life to university age. I always loved the illustrated covers and pastel tones of the 80′s versions. The covers were painted by James Mathewuse, a book cover artist known for his work on the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series.

The covers themselves went through many changes from the 80′s - 2000′s, reflecting the changing times. Below shows the evolution of one of the novels.

There was also the infamous Judy Blume books. I recall reading ‘Are you there God, it’s me Margaret’ (which recently turned 50 years old!) as a kid. Below is a variety of variations of its book cover. What I find interesting looking at both the Sweet Valley books and Judy Blume, is the noticeable move from illustrative designs to real life model photography use in the 2000′s, and a more prominent use of the authors name.

A book I have always had a love for is the classic, Alice in Wonderland. I have several versions of it as I adore collecting the variations of book covers and flicking through to look at the illustrations. There have been 100′s of cover designs created for Alice since its first publishing. In fact, you can learn a lot about the evolution of book cover design purely from just looking at one book throughout the years. Alice goes through many changes, from her fashion and appearance to being omitted altogether and replaced by floral patterns. The typography used goes from elaborate gold foil script use to bold 70′s serif use. We even see other popular children’s author, Tove Jansson (author of the Moomin books) create a very recognisable cover design in her iconic style.

Above: the original 1898 Alice in Wonderland Book Cover, which featured a beautiful and illustrative font.

References

For my first book cover concept of this project, I wanted to focused on quite possibly, the most commonly known aspect of climate change - sea level rising which ultimately creates flooding. Flooding is heavily featured throughout the book as one of the many natural disasters that lie ahead. 

INSPIRATION

Throughout the book, ‘An Uninhabited Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells, we find many pieces of information and quotes on the subject:

“likely flooding”

“thanks to flooding and literal sinking, it [Jakarta; one of the worlds fastest growing cities] could be entirely underwater as soon as 2050″

“Damages from river flooding would grow thirty fold”

“flood damage would increase by between 160 and 240%”

“even empires of agribusinesses slipping underwater”

EXPERIMENT

Taking inspiration from this, I thought about how I could engulf my typography in water to show a them of drowning/flooding. I experimented with some thick display text and water. 

I really wanted to recreate the reflected lettering in this experiment as I felt this was the clearest way to show the letters were underwater. 

I also played around with photographing this myself however found it really difficult to capture the image I wanted with the tools I had. I eventually used a stock image to recreate the lettering sliding underwater and this became the cover for my first concept. 

I used a thick display font and gave it a 3D look in photoshop as I wanted it to look as thought it was light enough to be floating but heavy enough to be sinking, into the deep water below. I also wanted this text to appear clean, shiny and industrial, like the many cities of the modern world who will unexpectedly be engulfed in water in the future. I chose a relatively clean image of clear water as I wanted give a feeling of depth and unknown to create some fear. 

I think took the design into InDesign to add the template and the additional text. I think this cover captures the bleakness of the future of the earth well and I am happy with the overall finished product. I wish I could have captured the image of the water myself however my underwater camera skills leave a lot to be desired.

REFLECT

Having put my work into a mock up file is PS (a rather difficult job to align with the wrap around cover and less than ideal PSD file), I am glad I chose on large singular image to wrap around the book. It carries the message of drowning on in a cohesive manner. 

Taking a look at the tends of book covers throughout the decades

The 1910s saw books still commonly covered in cloth, with delicate monograms. Interestingly enough these examples all seem to follow similar styles in the type choice, and an intricate pattern surrounding it a central image. 

Artist designed covers were becoming quite regular now on book shelves. Books would now regularly have dust covers made of paper, meaning they could have much more interesting designs mass printed. Francis Cugat and Vanessa Bell were both painters come designers who provided artworks for The Great Gatsby and To The Lighthouse respectively.

1930 trends appeared to have a lot of illustrated artwork, paired with a bold type. The illustration style was very traditional and mirrored that of the traditionally animated films that were growing in popularity. 

Something noticeable about the 1940s covers was the exploration of type-only, or type-centred novels. There was a lot more exploration of typography and it’s integration into a design, rather than just a superimposed title.

The 1950s seemed to have a lot more abstract artwork. Some really bold illustrations were used, but following on from the exploration into type - there seems to be a lot more thought about the placement of the type and how it works alongside the illustration.

The 60s seemed to be a turning point for book covers. There’s a lot more design creativity in these images. The type and images being much more playful together. These examples show the move away from illustration work.

In the 70s book covers you can see a clear shift towards photography being used. The composition of the photography plays with the type creating layers. 

The 80s seemed to have a lot of books that had large, bold text on the front. This seemed to be the theme where there would be little to no imagery on the cover with it. There seems to be quite a stripped back approach.

Speaking of stripped back, the 90s appear to be more minimalist and edgy looking. There’s a lot more negative space used between the text and there’s a lot of duller colours. Albeit the most popular books of the 90s were childrens books, so it’s possible there was an attempt to create a clear divide between the illustrated colourful images you might see on Harry Potter and these young adult and adult fictions.

The 2000s we can see that this stripped back approach is still popular. Often the books seem to have a central image and neutral background. The fonts in these examples are even quite simple.

The last decade didn’t stretch much further in design trends. There was a lot of sans serif, centre-aligned titles over layered on top of a dramatic photograph. These are visually quite striking, and certainly wouldn’t be out of place hung on a wall as well as on the front of a novel. 

The origins of the paperback can be traced back to Mid Victorian Britain; with the industrial revolution in full swing public access to education and rail travel was on the rise. A new readership, less wealthy than book owners of the past but keen for adventure, were met with low-cost, cheaply printed ‘yellowbacks’ or ‘penny dreadfuls’. Prevalent throughout train station concourses these were:

Printed entirely in paper, without a hard cover, and in a smaller format

(Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon, 2017)

The name ‘yellowback’ refers to the yellowy colour of the cover due to the use of low quality wood pulp in their manufacture. This incredible Flickr account has over 2000 examples, providing hours of browsing their weird, wonderful and at times bizarre titles.

Hillyard, W. Heard (William Heard), Recollections of a Physician, or, Episodes of Life, Ward and Lock, 1861. Bennett, John, fl. 1858-1870., Revelations of a Sly Parrot, Ward & Lock, 1862.  Lysle, Percy, A Frisky Matron, George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1897.  Wraxall, Lascelles, Wild Oats, J. & C. Brown, 18--

‘Penny Dreadfuls’ were cheap (one penny), serial literature published weekly

‘Penny bloods’ was the original name for the booklets that, in the 1860s, were renamed penny dreadfuls and told stories of adventure, initially of pirates and highwaymen, later concentrating on crime and detection. Issued weekly, each ‘number’, or episode, was eight (occasionally 16) pages, with a black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the rest, breaking off at the bottom of the final page, even if it was the middle of a sentence.

Judith Flanders (May 2014)

By the 1920′s & 30′s, in the aftermath of the First World War, direct printing on to cloth became too expensive and so book cover illustrators moved their focus to the paper ‘dust covers’. Advancements in printing techniques allowed for four colour mechanical printing, where these paper dustjackets had previously been purely functional, they now became the star attraction.

First Edition of Mutiny of the Bounty, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, Little, Brown and Company, 1932

By 1935 a more educated general public demanded a better quality of literature than seen in the Penny Dreadfuls (or their American cousin The Dime Novel) but still required access at low cost. This leaves publishers in a quandary, paperbacks are synonymous with low-level literature and; they don’t anticipate readers of this type of fiction to be interested in ‘real’ literature. 

One man looked to change this preconception and with his two brothers established the publishing house ‘Penguin Books’. In 1935 Allen Lane Williams sought to 

“Bring great literature to large numbers of people through cheap paperbacks”

AbeBooks 2018

What was really clever about his vision was the branding of their covers. Designed by Edward Young it is their apparent simplicity that has made them iconic. A series of three horizontal bands with type set in Bodoni Ultra Bold and Gill Sans; a system of colours is devised to represent the theme of the book, orange for fiction, dark blue for biographies, green for crime, purple for essays, pink for travel & adventure, red for theatre/drama and yellow for miscellaneous.

Penguin Book Covers

Costing just six pence each (about the same price as a packet of cigarettes) this low cost was crucial to their widespread appeal. Beyond train station kiosks, these books were stocked in department stores and high street favourite Woolworths. Within their first year, Penguin had published three million books. 

In 1937 Lane went one step further and invented the ‘Penguincubator’ a penguin pocket book vending machine.

The Penguincubator

This is my final book cover for this brief. 

I do surprisingly love how this turned out, I do think it symbolises the book subject matter greatly with the word ‘Earth’ dissolved into the chaos. 

I loved how I made the book cover slightly smaller than what it was meant to be, to look like an actual page in the book. 

I was able to achieve this dissolving earth type, by using photoshop on my iPad. I do believe using my iPad for smaller pieces, where I need a lot of room, works best for this. I done this by hand, simply by using the eraser tool in photoshop. This makes every letter unique. 

As I travel through along my Graphic Design journey, my new focus is pulling away from the literal. One of my last creations was a brick wall that I was trying to turn into a logo, and my tutor showed me the multitude of ways I could adapt the shapes I had to start giving “the idea of bricks” without being so blatant as to draw a wall.

I can’t deny that my hand was held through a lot of this process, but I’m amazed the lessons I’ve apparently learned.   When breaking down elements of Syal’s book, I have focused on the three protagonists: Chila, Sunita and Tania. One is a happy-go-lucky newlywed, settling into life with the man of her dreams. One a tired mother, begrudgingly running a household and feeling like she’s doing all the legwork for her husband. The third, a breakaway from the Punjabi community, having transferred successfully into The City Lifestyle, she begins to long for a home that she’s left behind. It’s the third of these that struck me last night as I was breaking the title into three sections and applying each section to a character. With broad brushstrokes I simplified the personalities: happy, tense and lonely, and as I began to consider why they felt that way (e.g. Chila  newlywed - happy  wedding traditions, or Sunita  cross-cultural relationship - lonely  commuter isolation) I sketched out either life, isn’t all or haha heehee using expressive typography – picturing how those parts of these women’s lives could represent the title words. My next post will delve into this exercise in more detail (I probably should have saved my wordy explanation for then), but it was while drawing out lettering on the advertisements that follow you down the London Underground escalators that a thought proudly hit me: “Obviously I won’t put this in, it’s far too literal – but I could go somewhere with these rectangles in this formation.”

Experiment & Reflect

CONCEPT 1

Inspiration

‘.... it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead.’  

One of the things I read in the book that really struck me was that Earth has already experienced five mass extinctions and four of those involved climate change.  At the very heart of climate change is the rising temperature of the planet and everything else from rising sea levels, drought, famine etc are a knock on effect due to global warming.  I think from the beginning of this project I was keen to represent the elements of climate change within the designs of my covers and this was the starting point for my first concept.

For this concept I wanted to focus on the warming of the planet and ways I could replicate fire.

The first technique I tried was using acrylic paint to create a print.  This was something I had done in an earlier project and was really pleased with the texture it had created.

Wanted to create a coloured background I then wanted to push to see it I could create something less busy so took some cuttings from my pastels to create a mesh to colour. I was really pleased with the outcome so started to add the same typography as before. Still not sure if it would connect with the target audience I used a more playful typography and I was a lot more happy with the outcome.