I have chosen “digitalisation” as my book cover theme and title “In the Midst of Digitalisation” to express my futuristic vision for physical manifestation of digital information and computation.
I decided to use a butterfly on front book cover because it is a symbol of constant evolution that digital world is going through.
A butterfly transforming from a dull creature like caterpillar into a beautiful vibrant butterfly symbolises rapid development in technology. We have moved from analog computer systems to advance digital interactive systems that range from smart phones, tablets to multi-touch tables and many other technologies. This idea drove my inspiration towards the theme ‘Digitalisation’ followed by the title “in the midst of digitalisation”. A butterfly as a single living being has some of the most complex and sophisticated existence. The simplicity of a butterfly represents simplicity of modern technology itself. A butterfly has a simple purpose in life to survive, reproduce and die in a short span of time, which also reflects a short time period of software and programs as new versions are constantly developed and updated. After hours of inspirational hunt on the Internet, I was convinced that a butterfly is a perfect reference and representation of this concept.
Taking this brainstormed idea further, I started with sketches of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.
I wanted to illustrate a glowing bright metallic butterfly, which stands out from blurred background because I want the subject to be in focus. To achieve this effect, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop CS6 (image editor software) to digitally hand-draw my vision. I scanned the final sketch and imported it into Photoshop. I started working by digitally painting different parts of butterfly on different layers using brush tool with help of Wacom pen and tablet, which is a digital pen input device. Unlike using mouse the graphic pen and tablet provided me an intuitive response similar to traditional pen or pencil, which made navigating around my work much easier. In addition, Wacom pen and tablet enabled me to use Photoshop to a great extent by enabling pen pressure and advance digital painting options rather than a mouse that does not give you feel of a pen.
I decided to use a butterfly on front book cover because it is a symbol of constant evolution that digital world is going through.
A butterfly transforming from a dull creature like caterpillar into a beautiful vibrant butterfly symbolises rapid development in technology. We have moved from analog computer systems to advance digital interactive systems that range from smart phones, tablets to multi-touch tables and many other technologies. This idea drove my inspiration towards the theme ‘Digitalisation’ followed by the title “in the midst of digitalisation”. A butterfly as a single living being has some of the most complex and sophisticated existence. The simplicity of a butterfly represents simplicity of modern technology itself. A butterfly has a simple purpose in life to survive, reproduce and die in a short span of time, which also reflects a short time period of software and programs as new versions are constantly developed and updated. After hours of inspirational hunt on the Internet, I was convinced that a butterfly is a perfect reference and representation of this concept.
Taking this brainstormed idea further, I started with sketches of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.
I wanted to illustrate a glowing bright metallic butterfly, which stands out from blurred background because I want the subject to be in focus. To achieve this effect, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop CS6 (image editor software) to digitally hand-draw my vision. I scanned the final sketch and imported it into Photoshop. I started working by digitally painting different parts of butterfly on different layers using brush tool with help of Wacom pen and tablet, which is a digital pen input device. Unlike using mouse the graphic pen and tablet provided me an intuitive response similar to traditional pen or pencil, which made navigating around my work much easier. In addition, Wacom pen and tablet enabled me to use Photoshop to a great extent by enabling pen pressure and advance digital painting options rather than a mouse that does not give you feel of a pen.
As soon as I finished painting my butterfly in Photoshop, I realized I had made a terrible mistake.
The butterfly was looking fine except that it did not look metallic from anywhere, which had given me trouble. I tried using numerous texture brushes in Photoshop but the result wasn’t satisfying. I then set out to find real world textures that I can use and started stocking photographs of different metallic, grunge and various elemental textures that I found around the university and my neighborhood. I used my Samsung Galaxy S3 mobile phone’s camera for texture photography because it can capture a decent 8 Mega pixel image. These photographs were useful enough for texturizing different parts of my painting because it would be difficult and time-consuming task to paint hyper-realistic texture in Photoshop.
The butterfly was looking fine except that it did not look metallic from anywhere, which had given me trouble. I tried using numerous texture brushes in Photoshop but the result wasn’t satisfying. I then set out to find real world textures that I can use and started stocking photographs of different metallic, grunge and various elemental textures that I found around the university and my neighborhood. I used my Samsung Galaxy S3 mobile phone’s camera for texture photography because it can capture a decent 8 Mega pixel image. These photographs were useful enough for texturizing different parts of my painting because it would be difficult and time-consuming task to paint hyper-realistic texture in Photoshop.
I was using the photographs to complex textures like the wings of butterfly, details in cocoon and other foreground and background support elements. Besides that another important aspect was to choose the color palette for my painting. The first thoughts were to have bright vibrant colours as associated to the theme of nature as well as technology. During my initial research on other books, I also came across the fact that in bookstores some of the books with this kind of vibrant color palette on their covers pop out more to human eyes. So, the obvious choice was between three primary colors red, green and blue. I tried different combinations of these three and found out that the contrast of blue and red makes a very attractive visual. I started coloring my butterfly with bright blue and black, this color combination mixed with the vivid grungy textures gives it a robotic look and feel. I painted the back ground with a dark combination of red and magenta shades using Photoshop brushes again. These colors set the mood right where I wanted and brings a nice contrast in the environment of the cover page design. In addition, this design follows through the spine of the book cover where I have mentioned the book title, authors name and the publisher’s logo along the horizontal thickness of the book.
The last thing in my composition of cover design was choosing a correct font which complements the design. For this, I tried searching the Windows fonts. I wanted a san-serif font with correctly balanced futuristic and modern. I was not happy with the result the Windows usual fonts were providing so I started searching different free font libraries online. After a short search for this, I came across a perfect font for my needs; “titanium thin” that looks clean, thin and has sharp edge for a modernistic san-serif font.
During this whole process of designing a book cover, there are a few things I could have done alternatively to improve the end results. Such as, the robotic feel of the butterfly could have been more realistic if I had used 3d designing method for it. But I could not do that as I am not as good with 3d modeling. Furthermore, if I had more time to work on my digital painting it would have been much more detailed and the result would have been very fine. In addition, the textures that I photographed would have been more appealing if I could use the professional DSLR camera to capture texture images, which I could not get from the media lab and had to use my own 8Mega pixel camera phone. Nevertheless, I am also content that the visual image that I had about this book cover in my mind at the beginning of this coursework is fulfilled to a certain level.
This whole experience to me has brought a lesson of evolution in not only my design process, but also in progress of how I reach certain decisions and resolutions for the end result.
