To come up with a Book cover that clearly links to what the book is about. Since the book addresses a very personal issue for the target audience i.e. immigrants in the United States, the cover had to evoke a sense of empathy and relatability.
Conceptualisation
The inital brief of the cover was to explore creatively, the different directions in which one could illustrate the plight of immigrants. With various symbols and combinations of layouts, we explored multiple concepts to fixate on one that showcases our key idea perfectly.
Art Direction
With a little preference to the 3D artstyle and something that looks realistic, we had the creative freedom to explore various art styles - illustration, photography, 3D, typography etc. for the cover. Considering our two week timeline, this was challenging but fun.
Through our inital discussions, some of the key elements that were related to our issue and could be use in different combinations were - immigrants, symbols to show the United States, Business men and women, passports, flags, humans. Apart from this, the client had an idea of having a couple of passports stacked and wound by chains. So for our first iteration, we worked on a couple of rough 2D illustrated concepts with one concept being a rough layout of their idea.
For our second iteration, we decided on exploring the 3D route more. For this purpose we chose to experiment with DALL E, a tool that uses machine learning and Artifical intelligence to create images from a string of prompts. The words which we used in different combinations for our prompts included - passports, shackled, chained, bound by metal chains, realistic, 3D, cinematic lighting, highly detailed.
We got some interesting generations but nothing that could be used directly. This did however inspire us to explore different layouts and orientations and that what we did for our next iteration. Using Blender, we created a set of layouts for the central element for the book cover. Along with this, we were parallely exploring some more interesting art styles.
After creatively exploring multiple directions, we needed to streamline and we shortlisted on the following two covers that best depicted our key concept. One had a 2D illustration while the other had a 3D render as their central element.
