Typography evaluation Harper Lee to kill a mockingbird

Forhad Ahmed 305611

Summary

The final design of my book follows the theme that this is a dark book with death and a loss of innocence. The cutout from the page emphasises a loss in the story but I made it a mockingbird to tie it into the title. The red in the eye symbolises blood which foreshadows the death in this book.

The text is a kind of dark gothic style font and it's in blood red to symbolise the blood and also a sense of alertness. The only colour present is red which is a known colour to increase heart rate and metabolism and is also a colour used for alertful visibility i.e. Fire extinguishers and stop signs.

Themes identified

The general theme of the book is the loss of innocence because the characters Jem, Tom Robinson, Dill, Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond all lose their innocence throughout the story.

On the final cover of my book the themes identified are those of death and tragedy. The dull colours used foreshadow a dark story with a lack of light which would symbolise good/hope. The general dark theme with the most present colour being red and faded white shows a sense of dread. The title itself connotes mortal sin in the future tense.

Linking the typeface to the theme

The style of text is also gothic and dark in nature, all tall capitals in a blood red makes for a serious title. Although the story of the book has a course of justice I wanted to focus my title and cover on the dark and murky aspect of the book so I took inspiration from Marey Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Emily Bronte’s wuthering heights which are understandably the creme de la creme of horror fiction but from my point of view as the reader that's what I wanted to portray. I wanted people who pick this book up to understand it's going to get dark from the outset the way I established this is with a font that is serious but not in the sense of health and safety more along the lines of a warning but on some of the letters you can see the typeface has like flicks and curves that give it a gothic feel.

Contextual influences The cover was inspired by an artist from Minnesota called Julia Strand who carves intricate designs into old books I didn't do her exact style but I took the idea from her to remove a silhouette from a page. I then used my own copy of to kill a mockingbird and scanned a page that didn't give too much away and cut my silhouette from it. A book cover that influenced my work was Little bee by Chris Cleave but I did my text as the opposite of that by keeping the silhouette text free but I took inspiration from the eye used on the cover. My cover in comparison with the traditional covers of this book is much dimmer and kind of grim when compared to the 50th anniversary edition which I read I have traded creamy-yellows for fading white and desaturated black and the child on the tyre swing is swapped out for an absent mockingbird with an eye of death. My version focuses on the loss of innocence whereas the cover I worked off is one of innocence which is the beginning of the book and mine is more focused on the beginning and the end where the plot unfolds.

Contextual influences continued

The reason I think the original cover is effective is because it holds a sense of mystery, as the book has been around for so long people understand that it's not about mockingbirds and the cover arts always feature mockingbirds and/or children so a possible reader would look at it and think “well I know it’s not about mockingbirds so what could it be about?” It plays on the mind and I think cover illustrators have use the status of the book being a well known book to their advantage.

From the top left: Julia Strands work, more work from Julia Strand, Little Bee by Chris Cleave, the rest are to kill a mockingbird covers including the 50th aniversary one.

Stages of design process

Firstly I planned my shoot with ideas of how to portray innocence being lost so the initial idea was to make clear water getting violated and murky. I ended up not using these images as the container was not cooperating with my vision of the cover. To progress from this but continuing with the theme I used milk instead of water and shot from the top down instead.

Stages of design process continued

I ended up making a cover using the milk but I didn’t use it as my final piece because It didn’t cover all the aspects I needed for my cover. It was too brief and left too much to the imagination.

I then moved away from the idea of food colouring after discovering Julia Strands work and I photocopied a page from my book and started splattering red ink I also tried this ink splatter technique with plain page and a feather but I also felt that this was too vague for the cover although I used the feather in 2 of my later designs.

Stages of design process continued (2)At first when I started working with the silhouette cut out I used a bird drawn free hand just to experiment. I liked the way it looked so I progressed to using an actual outline of a mockingbird. It was then I decided that I preferred that the spatter should just remain inside the bird and the exterior text should remain clean so to symbolise the impact of the mockingbird. I also experimented with a streak/smudge of red going through the cutout which I used for one of my final designs. I even explored a non secondary sourced design which was inspired by the red into milk design in which I had a red banner across a white background and I had all the text in the banner. For the final final design I used the font Annabelle which is a gothic font and is an all capitals typeface I coloured this in red and I placed it above the cutout and I placed Harper Lee’s name below making the bird the central theme.

Why my final design works

My final design works as an imaginative and original design using typefaces which link the main theme of my book because my overall design would be described as gothic/dark and one of the recurring themes is haunted/supernatural elements such as the random snowfall, the fire in Miss Maudie's house, the unspoken stigma around Boo Radley, the mad dog that gets put down and the attack on Halloween. In some ways the page itself represents Maycomb and the mockingbird symbolises the disorder and aftermath that gets brought to the small and quiet town that is not usually out of line like words on a page. The contrast of the old fashioned look of the paper which goes hand in hand with the era and setting of the book directly contrast the gothic font because the paper is like a symbol of small town living and the gothic font has no place amongst it. It almost foreshadows a ‘big trouble in a little town’ type of feeling.

Why my final design works continued

My design is also imaginative and original because of how unorthodox it is as a book cover. No traditional book cover would use a page from inside the book. It's a risk move as readers can quite literally judge the book by it's cover because the cover is the content of the book. However I used this to my advantage by pulling a huge chunk from the text with my mockingbird silhouette. This means that a potential would never be able to fully read the content of the book and if they started then they couldn’t finish.