Exercise: Making a mock-up

For this exercise you are going to mock-up a book cover.

I’ve decided to choose from the books I’ve already read. Somehow I feel that it’s not right to make a cover for a book you’ve never read.

I’ve chosen an Andy Warhol’s book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again)”.

This is how the original cover of my book looks like.

I’ve found few other existing covers.

But there was only one I’ve really liked. This one.

The covers design is a copy of a Campbell’s soup can. I think it’s a good solution, it’s simple and clear.

I’ve started with making a small mindmap about And Warhol.

I’ve analyzed everything written there and chosen 2 paragraphs that could probably work really good together.

This is what was my inspiration for a new cover.

Flowers and strips. Andy Warhol often wore a striped sailor shirt.

I think Andy Warhol’s cover should be simple but bright and spectacular at the same time. I’ve tried my best to make my cover look like this.

I think that when you are doing a book cover, you should try to make text and an illustration look as two parts of one whole. You shouldn’t get a feeling that text is fighting against an illustration when you look at the cover. I hope I’ve managed to achieve this and on my cover book’s title works together with an illustration.

I even had an idea to make a title itself be a main part of the cover.

Working with this idea i had a ping pong game on my mind – A is playing with B, and it works in both sides.

I didn’t even think seriously about this idea, but I did enjoy the time thinking about it and developing it a bit.

Categories: exercises, Illustration