Yes, after a long hiatus I present you with another “Anatomy of..” post. This time I’ll talk about a new book Liz & I designed for Mam Tor™ Publishing: St. Cyborg’s by Nick Wray.
St. Cyborg’s is a collection of short SF stories, all centering around the titular institution. The title, to me at least, implied something of a catholic boys school and I started thinking along the lines of using an iconic image based on religious symbolism but with a contemporary/Sci-Fi slant.
Various “robot” parts
Since the cover design would play on the cyborg theme I started designing various elements in Illustrator that I could use to build a cyborg. When you think of cyborgs in popular (SF) culture, you’ll always think of them as a mixture of organic and robotic parts (the Terminator perhaps being the most famous example). For the cover I wanted to focus on the cold mechanical part (also because a skull is more dramatic than a face).
Cyborg design
After having designed the cyborg skeleton I was a bit unsure how it would work on the cover. Its a nice image, but it lacks focus. One of the prime requirements for a cover image is that it catches your attention. The full body of the cyborg was too static.
Artwork cropped to cover size
When I started designing the cover, I thought it’d crop the artwork so the head of the cyborg fills up the whole space.
This creates a much more powerful image and focuses the attention on one element. I also decided early on to keep the cover image very minimal by only using 2 or 3 basic colours.
Cover art with halo
The next element to bring in was the halo. At first I played around just using a flat disc (as is common in religious iconography), but felt it was too flat and it didn’t really fit with the rest of the art.
So I designed a “cybernetic” version if you will that fitted with the tone of the book.
Final cover for St. Cyborg’s
For the final design of the book, I got rid of the “Bender” teeth and put the title/author in that spot, slightly changed the position of the artwork and flipped it for the back cover (I’ve always liked the idea of the back cover being an extension of the front cover), using the back of the cyborg for the content blurb and other text that needs to be shown (playing with the idea that its imprinted on his back).
Instead of designing a custom title (like I did for Worry Doll) I went with standard Helvetica Neue Bold, for no other reason that the cover art was strong enough that it didn’t need to be supported by another graphic element (which would only detract from it), and seeing that the theme of the book is an institution, you can’t go wrong with Helvetica.
The book is currently at the printer and will be available in December if I’m not mistaken.
November 28th, 2007
how long did it take? from brief to release of files.
November 28th, 2007
I started on the initial design in August 07 and then it lay dormant for a few months until November 07.
All in all I’d say a week and a half everything combined…