"Chapter On Love" Cover
The design problem here is to create a front/back cover (5x8in) and spine (1.379x8in) for the novel Chapter on Love by Miklos Szentkuthy. As I read the book I was struck by the sheer amount of images within each page. Reading through this magnitude of powerful imagery originally had me thinking of ways to render these images into covers. Yet, as I read to completion and later heard Erika Mihalycsa (the translator) lecture on the book, I began to see the greater vision behind Szentkuthy’s work. The ideas of duality, paradox, comedy and the progression of narrative began to take over my thought process. As I worked through images and compositions for these concepts I began to become most interested in the way in which the story is told. The conventional narrative is thrown to the wind and progresses instead through barely logical connections of thoughts. In this light, the novel has less of an emphasis on the images themselves but rather how they relate and connect (or do not). For this reason, I chose the “Tendril” design, as I refer to it.
Alternate Covers
Process
Description
This design mimics the thought progression detailed in the prose, webbing and spreading, overtaking the speaker and audience together. The tendrils themselves are handwritten quotes from the book to express this point as they weave around both covers, the spine, and the text of the synopsis and title. Szentkuthy highlights the organic and illogical process of thought, making a “comedy of learning”, as Erika Mihalycsa pointed out. Thus, writing all the words in the tendrils by hand then digitizing conveys this organic process. Working with the flaws of my technology I decided it would, in fact, serve my purposes to have a ruff and occasionally illegible rendering of these tendrils as such an effect would showcase the style of thought in the novel.
As for the background, I wanted this to be the stage on which these thoughts are created. For this purpose, I chose black with granular tints of red. I took inspiration from closing one’s eyes in front of the sun. However, I wanted this space to be tainted by love or passion so I added a texture reminiscent of red velvet to this black space. Thus, the cover is a rendering of the speaker’s mind as these thoughts scatter around his mind as he muses over love.
Details
front and back cover | 2 alternate covers | 5x8in | 60 hours
Medium: handwritten calligraphy (broad pen and ruling pen), image and scan manipulation (PS), shape creation (AI), layout, typesetting, and presentation (ID)
Mentor: Alessandro Segalini
