08nd of April 2025
Our first course assignment was to make a book cover using one or more of the gestalt principles. We got four books to choose from, and I chose to do Frankenstein. It’s a classic, and although I’ve never read it myself, it has some fun themes and symbols in it that I wanted to play with.
First we had to do some idea generation. Mine looked something like this:
I used a mind map, as well as a morphological analysis to create some ideas which might work. I ended up liking the morphological analysis best, as that gave me some visuals to work with. So, with that in mind, I created 3 sketches:
To be fair, it was kind of hard to use the gestalt principles when sketching out my ideas. I really liked my second sketch, as that’s where the principles were the most prominent, but one of my teachers gave me the great idea of combining sketch 1 and 2, so that’s when I came up with this:
Now this looked like something I could work with! I included a monster’s face inside the chemistry bottle using the lightning strikes as well, so that I could include 3 themes/symbols from the book.
Doing this digitally was hard, not gonna lie. I’ve only ever used photoshop, and never even touched illustrator, so it was tricky. But my final product, and the book cover I ended up up delivering, turned out surprisingly good (after some trial and error, and a bunch of swear words š
I chose to go with a green color, as that’s what I think of when I heard the name Frankenstein, and a lighter green as the accent color, as white was too harsh. The fonts I used were Richmond for the title, and Montserrat for the subtitle. Using a serif for the title was a no brainer, as it’s an old, classic book, and a sans serif pairs well with it, so it looked good together. The lightning strikes took me forever to do, and I probably could have done it a whole lot easier if only I knew how to use illustrator properly, but I managed. Making the face especially was hard, as I had to use so many smaller lightning strikes to make it prominent enough.
Anyway, that’s my first ever course assignment for my studies, and the first real piece of graphic design I’m making from scratch. Excited for the continuation, but first:
Easter break! š
Maria Haugen 