I really love the way this mock up looks. The gradient purple color background is an intentional choice. This is because the color purple which is always associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. I wanted the book to have a black cover without many distraction and the white shape feel like it has form and its not just a flat cover. If this book were to be real the shape containing the letters would be bumped up a bit which would make it kind of unique and not just a simple print. (The detailed process of how this cover with the shape and letters was made is explain below) 

In this stage we had to find a book or literary piece that would well with our theme and replace our text. I knew exactly which book was going to be the chosen to have this amazing piece. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. by examining the fallout from unrealistic expectations, the distorting effects of wealth with the result of social status, the loneliness brought on by a singular goal, and the tragic ending of the main character, Jay Gatsby. I layed out the text and tried to follow the original way I layer the main theme on the shape. At first the background and text were going to be white, with the shape black but when it came to doing the mock up when playing with the layers, it resulted that the inverse worked way better. So I decided to use the inverse and also remove the label of "illustration by Said Nunez" which detracted a bit from the design. With this I was ready to preform the final mock up.

After I looked at my previous designs, I went back to the drawing board and I picked one shape that caught my attention. From there I decided to wrap the text around it to unify them. The result after playing around looked stunning to me.

We then had to connect letters to the shapes we had made before. We could also make a new arrangement if non of the ones we made before worked to make an appealing design. I picked the cost Hubris as my main theme which means the result of arrogance. I liked this first one where I incorporated the text and then played around with how to unify the shapes witht he letters. Symbolizing how an arrogant person tries to show off with an elegant design. Then  the second one to me looks almost like a disco ball which ges very well with the theme of someone being arrogant and wanting to outshine everyone. The last one is to me like going through the rough path for being such an arrogant individual.

For this step we had to use type containing our theme in a way that would compliment the shapes we had already made. We had to find out type that would compliment the idea, we needed to think of placement, size, contrast, kerning and many other things.

Later on we had to draw improve 10 of the sketches brought up before without introducing new themes. I picked three from the cost of Hubris, two from betray, Perseverance through great struggle, one transience of existence / connection to infinite, and lastly Faith in / struggle with the unknown.

In this project we needed to make a minimum of 30 sketches, exploring a variety of themes. with only abstract, graphics, or geometric shapes and lines in black and white only, no gray.It needed to be no representational imagery or symbols like hearts, leaves, arrows, etc. We could be inspired to make these shapes by themes like 

Good and Evil, Good vs an evil society, Temptation by evil forces and many more.