Assignment 2: A Photographic Book Cover; Fahrenheit 451

Before finally committing myself to any one choice of book or cover, I decided to experiment with another of the titles I had designed:  'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury.  This bleak novel is set in a post-literate future where books are banned as being the source of all discord and unhappiness.  Instead of being treasured and valued by society, they are burned.  This would be the theme of my book cover.

  When we had our wood-burning stove lit and it had burned down nicely to glowing logs, I set up the camera and then placed an old pamphlet that we had read on it and photographed it as it burned. I then opened a photoshop document set to the actual size of a paperback book and imported my image.  I wanted this to form the cover background and so resized the image to fill the document, partially desaturated it and applied a gaussian blur to give an impressionist feel to it.  I then re-imported the image, this time cropped to square and with a black border to help it to stand out.  Finally I added the titles and blurb.  I used a mixture of Georgia and Times New Roman and experimented with both black and red font to see which suited the best.

On balance I prefer the second version.  I think that the black stands out better on the title but I found that the red reads more easily for the blurb on the back cover.