A Room With A View... For Type

When designing paintings (or whatever your medium of choice may be) it's always a good idea to leave space for the eye to rest. This is especially true when designing covers for books, magazines, motivational pamphlets, and anything else that an illustration will have to share real estate with type. As an illustrator the last thing you'd want is for a designer to place type over some tasty bit of the image you worked hard to create. (And I hear the designers are none too happy when they aren't left room to work either...) To that end it's always a good idea to not only leave room for bleed (a topic I'll tackle in a later post) but to design for type as well. If for no other reason it'll show that you're capable of doing such and could lead to work in the future.

To that end, whenever I'm designing specifically for a cover I like to drop in type when I'm done to get a sense of what my image will look like all packaged up and sitting on a shelf. Since the book I recently re-imagined already exists I was able to use the copy that's already there. The design was just a really rough, really quick lay in. I'm sure a proper designer would do a much better job - I just had to know if the addition of type, and logos, and titles, and names would detract from my illustration.

Aaaaand, since I went through the bother of painting the image as a spread, I dropped in type and such on what would be the back cover as well. Again, using the basic design that's already in place, I just dropped in the information to make sure my image isn't ruined or too distracting for the type. Overall I'd say things worked out well. Even though it's a rough treatment for the type, I feel everything works together pretty harmoniously .