Bound: A Senior Narrative Book Jacket by Maximillian Raschke (2017)

My project in design was to create a book jacket for the story we wrote in English. I went through several iterations of my book jacket. Originally I was going to have it be a brown leather book that looked worn and tattered. I really didn’t like it, it was bland and boring. I still wanted to use the leather texture, but it needed color. I then tried to base the design around the red and blue books that are in my story. So I took the leather texture and changed the hue and saturation to be a bright red on the front cover and blue on the back. It still didn’t seem right. The two colors needed to mix more. I wasn’t sure how to mix the two until I came across this photo that inspired me.

It was perfect! It really helped to show how connected the two books in the story were. I put the red leather over the blue and vice versa on the back of the book. I experimented with having a woven seam between the two but it didn’t work. Eventually I got the idea of having the top layer torn to reveal the lower layer and with the help of a Youtube tutorial I achieved the effect I was looking for.