Travel guides

The brief for this exercise is to produce three illustrations for a series of book jackets, at the size of an existing travel guide – for the locations Istanbul, Helsinki, Milan. The client would like illustrations in which many elements are brought together in a diagrammatic way. They would also like the type to be hand-dawn in an appropriate style.

I’m going to begin by researching the three locations. I’m going to do this be searching images and then making quick drawings of them in my sketchbook. Based on this I’m going to think about and refine the brief before providing client visuals for all three illustrations and a mock-up for one. At some point I’ll also do some research into font styles that typify the three locations.

I then began to think about the format of the covers. An early idea is to use a map of the city in the background with drawings of key features of the city – buildings, food etc … – superimposed on top of the map. However, I’m not sure how well this would actually stand out on a bookshelf in a shop. I also quite like the idea of making a graphic cover, maybe in the country’s national colours, with key features silhouetted on top. If I develop this graphic idea, then the font is going to be an important component of the cover, conveying the feeling of the place, so I started looking into different fonts.

In the interests of time I’m going to run with the graphic idea and move onto producing line visuals. My plan is to have the writing and silhouettes in black on a coloured background from the respective countries national flags.

This is where it went a bit wrong. I became a bit obsessed with my initial line visual, which became time consuming, so I developed this into a final cover.

I took the hand drawn colour into photoshop and removed most of the background. I can never get the photoshop magic wand to behave how I want it to, so I end up using the rubber, which is time consuming. I’m also increasingly realising that I would be better off drawing the different elements of the image seperate from one another, so that they are easier to manipulate in illustrator and photoshop.

Once I’d removed the background, I then added in a background colour.

Stylistically I quite like the cover. I think using simple colours, with each book being a different colour taken from their national flag will be distinctive. I also quite like that it looks a bit like the elements have been cut out of paper and put together as a collage. I actually have plans in my head for a christmas card using the paper stars – which might look better if some of their internal white areas were removed.

My main criticism of myself in this exercise is that I failed to produce the three line visuals. This is something I struggle with – I get too particular and want them to look neat and tidy rather than being a representation and giving a feel of the final design. This is something for me to work on woth future exercises and assignments.

You get an idea of what the three designs for this exercise would look like from the thumbnails. The name of the city in an appropriate font is centre stage, then some silhouetted famous buildings and features of the city are at the bottom of the cover and some other decorative items at the top – lamps for Istanbul and shoes and bags for Milan. I had intended to make the neat cover for the Istanbul book cover as I think this would be the best of the three.