Design Brief: Penguin Books is launching a new series called ‘Famous Couples.’ Each book tells the story of a famous couple, such as Adam and Eve, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton, Kermit & Miss Piggy, etc.
Based on this project's Design brief shown above, we were told to either choose a fictional or non-fictional couple for further exploration.
The couple I ended up choosing was Jake Sully and Neytiri from 2009's movie "Avatar" due to their unique relationship and futuristic elements that were showcased throughout the film. These factors really caught my interest, and I immediately had an urge to create something simplistic, yet pleasing to the eye.
The general idea behind my book design is playing with the fact that Jake and Neytiri's relationship is quite abnormal. As they are completely different races from completely different planets, I wanted to display it in a way of differentiating the two figures but at the same time, display that they are similar in the sense of their mindset. Basically, the crowd of orange cubes represents the general public which stick to cultural standards. However, the two rotated cubes represent Jake and Neytiri and depicts their struggle to connect as a couple based on the opinions of everyone else. They are different colors to show they are different races, but their rotated position gives the sense that they are struggling together, in hope for the same outcome.
Scroll down to see my journey through the initial stages to the final product!
Shown above is the initial research I had done which is a list of adjectives that I constructed based on the two characters' traits as well as their relationship as a whole.
Shown below was the following step; creating quick sketches/visual representations based on my research really helped for ideation. After doing so, I finally narrowed my selection down to two main important words which I found best described Jake and Neytiri's relationship: adaptive and abnormal.
The next step in the process was digitizing some of my sketches and ideas in order to brainstorm possibilities for the actual cover. From left to right, here is the progression of my initial cover designs:
After some feedback and slight changes, I moved on to the spine and back cover. Here was my initial final design:
After further feedback, I slightly modified my design. Here is the final:
