The Sun Also Rises - Book Cover Design (ART205)

Here's a recent project I worked on for Typography class with Sharon Conlee as the instructor. I chose Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I haven’t read the book, but I’m familiar with his work. I like how short the title is, and how short the words are within it; I thought this would help out the design. I did some quick skimming and read a full book summary at Sparknotes.com. Having some idea as to what the book entails would no doubt drive my design.

I looked at a lot of full layout book covers online to see what kind of basic elements are involved. I also looked at other designs of the same cover. Most of these designs involved bullfighting and some sort of shadow to emphasize the “sun” part of the title. I know I wanted the title to take up most of the cover, as with a lot of popular titles in stores, and to only keep Hemingway’s last name on the cover.

I found a sun illustration on Sxc.hu (free royalty-free images) and also a photo of a bullfighter and bull. I liked the color scheme of the sun photo and decided to use that as a basis for the rest of the spread. Using the bullfight photo with lowered opacity as my extra texture I added a little more interest to the sun. The other design elements I used were an author photo, some basic shapes using a dark orange rectangle with lowered opacity, and finally the UPC and original publisher’s logo. I added an illustration of Hemingway’s signature on the back flap.

I used Futura as my title font; it’s bold and has a modern feel to it, which would go well with today’s bookstore. I used Georgia, in regular, bold, and italic to give hierarchy to the copy and review blurbs. Georgia was used because of its’ serifs, to contrast with the san-serif font Futura. I kerned a larger portion of the text, mostly the title and some of the copy, leading adjustments were also used to push text into a cleaner state within the rectangular design elements.

Here's the full jacket.