Judge a Book by it's Cover

For this project, I chose the book Reframing Consciousness from the library. The book mainly focused on consciousness and how it interacts with art and reality. There was a lot of scientific terminology and the book covered a wide range of subjects throughout which gave me a lot of starting points.

I began my initial ideas by focusing on the framing element of the title by using boxes. This also links in with a lot of the imagery from inside the book, and the use of boxes and grids to represent space (and maybe time) gives off a sci-fi atmosphere.

I realised however that this isn't the most interesting idea to try and develop, and it is also an element of the existing cover.

Instead I decided to focused on the consciousness part of the title and this gave me a lot more ideas to work with.

These were my next ideas, and I preferred these much more. the brain and eyes clearly give off the impression that this book has something to do with the brain and how it works, and I like how literal this idea is. On the next page, I experimented with automatic drawing which I found very interesting. In this idea, I am focusing more on a process relating to consciousness as opposed to attempting to illustrate consciousness itself. These were my favourite two ideas that I chose to pursue.

These were further ideas that i tried out but I didn't feel like they were as relevant to the book. The first page was more automatic drawing but I feel like the skull gives off the wrong impression. The second idea would look better in a digital media I think but the idea of using a kaleidoscope would've made it look quite psychedelic I think which isn't the idea I wanted to put across.

 

 

 

 

These are the various roughs I made. After these, I established that the brain and eyes are the elements that I want to be most important in the book cover, as well as the automatic drawing. I think using a relatively minimal colour scheme would look best for this, as it draws more attention to the illustrations.