In this project we designed book covers. I didn't realize how much I would enjoy it. Out of the five projects in this course, this is the one I gave my heart to. I had former experience with typesetting from years of learning and using LaTeX, but I never realized just how much I loved typography in general.
We were allowed to choose our own book as a start. I had recently received a Japanese copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I was learning Japanese at the time, and I figured the best way to continue my studies was to read a novel I was already familiar with in English. This is the original book cover:
After choosing our book, we were asked to come up with our own jackets for it. I wanted to honor the spirit of the text and that of Holden Caulfield himself. He wouldn't want a phony book cover, you know? I designed two varieties of book cover with this in mind.
With the first, I started by reproducing the original as closely as possible:
I was actually using LaTeX to do the typesetting, while using asymptote for the graphical manipulation of the text, not to mention in creating the outline of the border and folds of the jacket. The only downside to this approach is the lack of support for unicode in LaTeX. Because of this I didn't get to use an ideal font for the Japanese characters.
Following this, I took a minimalist approach and added text from the book itself to extend the original design. The book was about life, the relationships that connect and bind us, and a coming of age. I tried to show this visually:
and although I didn't submit the following two alternatives, it wasn't difficult to play with color once the code was set up:
The second jacket style I created was to have no jacket at all. Don't judge a book by its cover, you know? With that in mind, I took the first page of the book, copied it, and made it as the front of the jacket (Japanese reading style is actually top to bottom, right to left, so the front of a book is opposite to Western style books). Judge the merit of a book by its content, so just start with page one, no illusion, you know?