I thought about the plot, which deals with migration over rural America, so I tried to embody this with people across fields and people walking, as well as cars (featured in the story as a pose to the more metaphorical walking). I thought there'd be interesting design in there. I also looked at the literal embodiment of the title, using grapes and the idea of them being crushed in anger. I also showed this through a progression of non-crushed to fully splattered grapes, an attempt to reflect the plot that sees the workers go from bad to worse, until there's a stillborn birth and the ultimately hopeful ending is the mother to the stillborn breastfeeding a starving man (bleak stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.)
I tried to stay away from my traditional move toward illustration, first focusing on type and layout. I feel like I've exhausted my patience with actual drawing over the past few months and I want to focus on type skills and become a bit more well rounded as well as avoid falling into the 'illustrator' category. Prove my worth with more full and rounded design. Here's a PDF of various different layouts with space left to potentially include images. I just did it in purple because I was going to work with the grapes idea first after that and that seemed an appropriate choice. I like the idea of using black/white(stock)/another spot colour... the limited colour palette will work well as a series, I'm still not sure as to whether I should use one colour for the whole series or different colours for each novel. Hopefully as I progress, I can play around with this idea.
And here is the grapes idea. I think that the progression of grapes looks the most visually striking and I'm really pleased with how it looks in the three colour system. For some reason the grapes looked awful in purple so I didn't feature them here. The all black grapes in the diagonal cover look awful, I think mainly because I overlooked what I was doing with the splatter and there's one grape seemingly untouched which is really jarring. I'm not going to amend it because it's unlikely I'll go with it. The colour choices all work to me, the more vibrant they appear to be, the more the design (to my eye) really pops. I quite like the reddish colour because it sort of represents anger or wrath.
Then I thought I'd try out some different pure typographical layouts, they look alright to me, but I don't know enough about type to really 'get it.' Still I'll ask for some feedback from David Gasi and Will Asken, they've done the type module and can really help with things like that.
Moving on from this quite quickly, I again picked out the layouts I liked the best from the first pdf on this page and started messing around with the cars migrating idea. I traced a photograph of an old car I got off of the internet which still feels like cheating somehow to me. I was really pleased with the results and loved the way the windows and wing mirrors stood out. As I did the images, I realised the purple I started with for the grapes wasn't really working, it wasn't giving the sens of migrating across the countryside because the colours didn't really compute with maise/corn fields like it expects to.. i added some corn like shapes down one side of the road on one image but it didn't help. I think this is somewhat resolved when I changed to yellow and amber colours. However, I think more could be done, like adding baggage to the cars to get a sense of migration perhaps? Anyway, in terms of the individual layouts, I'm not sure which one I like the best and this is something I can get feedback on in the crit I guess.
I then amended this to people walking across the countryside, I think this works metaphorically, I'm not sure whether I like ti better as one man or the group, the group suits the story of a family more, though the man staring out to the path ahead sort of reflects the optimism of the family at the beginning, again this is something to get feedback on in the crit, though I think because of the limited colour palette, they all look reasonably strong. This one also works quite well in purple suprisingly, maybe because the theme has more clarity.
OK, so I'm going to start working on Tortilla Flat, because I have some really good ideas for that. I hope that the feedback in crit is helpful in terms of carrying on in this direction because I think they look really strong.
Mate, second Issuu down, top right and middle centre are great. Great colour and use of one + black and white. Text and framing effective, too. Third Issuu down, I really like the centre, nice pattern and cut-out title box.
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