Assignment: Design a book jacket mechanical for a book of the designer’s choice using only typographic elements and keeping typography as the visual focus. The book I chose is The Way I Used To Be by Amber Smith, which is about a teenage girl, Eden, who is a victim of sexual assault and is forever changed by the traumatic event. While navigating the throes of being a teenager, Eden also endures the lasting effects of her trauma with it affecting the way she behaves, her relationships, and her habits, leading down some dark and isolating paths. My goal was to convey the rawness and intensity of the subject matter of the book while also handling the type with sensitivity, giving it meaning and power beyond just what the words say.
Approach: I started with rough hand drawn sketches of just covers, focusing on composition instead of details, aiming for three vastly different concepts that all reinforced the meaning of the title and the content of the book. Through peer review, three of my twelve sketches were selected to be brought to the digital rough stage. After more peer feedback, two of the concepts were combined into one cover and the other concept was refined. Those were then made into full book jacket mechanicals where the finalized concept was chosen upon seeing the entire jacket system. From there, the type was revised to adjust details like hanging quotes, rags, em dashes, etc.
Result: The final work uses a simple sans serif typeface in all caps to show the rawness and intensity of the content while the repeating “ghosts” of the type reinforce the meaning of the title. The gaps between the type acts as a tool for enhancing the meaning, with the gaps’ symbolism being left up for interpretation. One stark feature of the gaps is how “I” is separated from “US”, showing how Eden isolated herself and lost relationships due to being affected by her trauma. The full jacket mechanical lends itself to the reader, carrying both obvious and hidden meaning while delivering necessary book information in a concise and unified way.
