Sci-Fi Paperback Covers #1

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Sci-Fi Paperback Covers #1
'Bright colors for a bright universe'

* Disclaimer* This project was developed during my MA at the University of Reading, where I attended the Book Design course. These are not Faber and Faber Ltd books, just dummies. The F&F logo has been used merely as a part of an exercise to make the mockups more realistic.

What I did for this project / I chose a literary genre and a hypothetical book series, studying the readership and the market, and I structured a brief. To respond to it I developed two graphic concepts, working on typography, grid and creating the illustrations.

Color Coding

Each sub-genre of Science Fiction is identified by a specific color hue. Covers from the same sub-genre share same hue (or tint) but have diverse shape, lightness and saturation. Series within the series (such as Dune series by Frank Herbert, or the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov) share the exact same combination of hue, lightness and saturation: only the shape of the stain differ from one volume to another.

From left to right, this is the color coding interpretation:

Light Blue & Grey Space Opera
Blu, Violet & Purple Hard Sci-Fi
Red & Purple Psychological and Social Sci-Fi
Red, Yellow & Pink Utopia and Distopia
Blue & Green Cyberpunk
Yellow & Black Other Worlds and Xenofiction
Brown & Black Political and Military Sci-Fi