In this four week long project, I chose the book, To Kill A Mocking Bird, written by Harper Lee and experimented with many ideas for three types of book cover. The categories of these three book covers were Handmade, which needs to have elements that are created physically and photographed, Typography only and Designer's choice. 

Throughout this project, I really had to step out of my comfort zone as I tried to explore with many ideas that would best describe and communicate the key message that the author wanted to share with its readers. The book, To Kill A Mocking Bird is seen from the eyes of the young narrator, Scout. It focuses on how prejudice and racism are destructive forces in society that can only be overcome through empathy, understanding, and a commitment to social justice. It shows the power that an individual has through their actions in promoting more peace or violence in this world. 

As I explored the different ideas and themes that came to mind, I settled with the theme innocence and destruction and begun to sketch out different ways I could represent these themes in design.

After testing out many different sketches I had in mind, I was ready to recreate this on the Adobe Photoshop software. With the ideas I had, I combined different images and pictures I had created to bring out the best book cover that communicates the key message of the book, To Kill A Mockingbird. 

With this book cover design, naturally the title stands out the most as it is the focal point of the design. In this title, we see a feather which replaces the letter "I" that represents the loss of innocence with the emphasis of social injustice in the background(bars/prison). The background has been blurred out as the typography is the main focus of this design. There is a slight gradient in the color as well which shows how our vision(point of views) can always been changed and does not have to stay with only one color.

I personally found this to be my favorite design out of all the three designs I worked on. Mostly because this idea took me the longest time to recreate and I had to make it with physical things I crafted and photographed. I cut out the birds from some papers and tore one into pieces. The silhouette of the girl I drew shows innocence as all as young children are not yet affected by worldly opinions and views. The paper birds in the silhouette has an odd one that is torn up and this represents the destruction that can be caused by those around it. The title is also typed with lowercase because with children, some rules of society do not affect them and so, this title does not have to be capitalized because not all titles need to have capitalized words. 

In this design, the hand shows the destruction of the mockingbird which is represented by a feather. We can see that the actions of an individual can affect an individual which could lead to their destruction as well.

With the help of my professor and my classmates, I was able to refine many of my designs and eventually settled with these final designs. Overall, I am very satisfied with how these designs turned out and it was a great learning experience for me.