This has been a more complicated project and time consuming than I would have hoped for. Mainly due to trying to find ways of including enough of the story or what’s behind the story, without comprimising and arriving at the same place as previous book covers and interpretations. This is hard to do given the depth of the book and the various things it covers. I can understand why previous versions of the cover tackled it in their way but for me they represent the main characters dual being as purely negative and his everyday nature as being correct, which misses the point. My version of the cover took three developments really. The first was the complex illustration which was too heavily laden with different visual components. Although I like how it slows the viewer down as there’s such a lot to look at, it’s too confused and any communication becomes muddled. The second addressed this and I tried to find a way of explaining what happens to the character in the book as he moves through his experiences in the story. The onion is a well understood symbol for how peoples personal being and ego is constructed and also serves as supporting the idea of the strange and mysterious content of the book. Originally I was going to use the image of the onion head and shoulders for the cover with the onion typography. I decided in the end that I could communicate other things such as the characters experience of the world he inhabits and others experience of him. This lead to the use of a false scence to represent his experience and how his being, doesn’t fit within it. The outer cover has a hole cut in it, in his shape, and his image is on the inside cover surrounded by white in reference to the magic theatre and a higher existence. When the pages are closed the images combine. The cover scene would also work for the beginings of web presence with a walk round and doors to click on etc.. The onion skin typography alone wasn’t used in the end as it didn’t communicate enough that the character is out of place and enough tension between itself and the background. The type then changed in to a more contemporary feel where I tried to change miter limit on the lettering to the point of being illegible. The ”wolf” would then use the organic look of onion type but have the same line effect placed over the top to copy the effect on the rest of the word in an attempt to show duality. In this project I was pleased to have used some of my own typography but the idea for the cover and how else it could spin off in to different applications took a long time to realise and time was shorter than I would have liked for the design, use of colour and layout and so on. It was a good exercise in layout and finishing off which I’ve learned from but its also suggested a lot of areas where I could have condense my thinking time to allow more for visual craft.
