Futura Specimen Book - Space and Junk

I admit it. I used to be a huge fan of Helvetica. Alas, my love has fallen to Futura. Digging deeper into the history of Futura brought on the theme for my type specimen book. Futura was used on many of the plaques attached to the lunar modules back in the day when going to the moon was cool and stuff. I couldn't help it, space is awesome and stuff.

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.