User:Jhellingman/Cover Pages

I've designed a couple of new cover pages for old books, mostly because cover pages where lacking, exceedingly worn-out, or just generic. They are intended to show up in galleries of cover-pages in book-readers and book cataloging software; and hence need to be readable even at very small sizes.

The design considerations I follow are:

• Readable at small sizes. The main elements of the title should be readable even if the cover image is reduced to about 150 pixels in height.
• Somewhat uniform: the cover images should give away that they come from the same source. This is achieved by using a similar design grid, the same font (Gentium), and a cloth background in all designs.
• Include original elements: when possible, I use graphic elements taken from the original source book.
• Include the date of first publication: to make clear the book is not a new book.

New Style Designs

These new-style designs have a couple of adjustments

• No more Gentium (It required to many manual adjustments, due to incomplete kerning tables for capital letters), I now use a classic Dutch design called "Hollandsche Medieaval", which was very popular in Holland in the 1920's to 1950's.
• Adjusted the proportions of the cover to better match common books.
• Added an embossed "stamp" of PGDP (when sufficient space is available).

Early new designs

Magazine Articles

These are all covers for the articles taken from the Dutch magazine "De Aarde en haar volken" (The Earth and her peoples). I've used the original green cloth covers as background for the designs, and then selected an illustration from the article that to me conveys the content of the article best. Photographs I've given some artificial sepia or blue toning. The titles are all set in the same font, applying some additional kerning where needed. The problem I face here is that I want the covers to be uniform, but the titles differ considerably in length.

For those who speak Dutch, the spelling is retained as in the original; together with the prominent year at the bottom of the cover, they are intended to remind the reader that the book is not a new book, but a re-issue of a very old article.

I've designed all these cover pages in a single, multi-layered photoshop file, at a much larger pixel size than here shown.

Brehm's Animal Life

Monographs

Of the book on Italy, the original cover had become unreadable due to wear. Instead of trying to restore it, I've constructed a new one from the frontispiece (a statue of Dante, to whom the author constantly refers, and apparently is an admirer.)

For the Eskimo Folk-Tales, I've taken the (originally green) cloth of the Dutch magazine cover, but turned it blue with the Hue/Saturation tool in Photoshop, and used the original frontispiece as a decoration.

Similarly, for the North Cornwall Fairies and Legends, the same cover was turned red. Here I used one of the books illustrations on the cover after applying some artificial sepia-toning.

For the English-Spanish-Tagalog dictionary, I've used contemporary flags of the relevant countries, again to make clear that the dictionary is an old one. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that the use of the Philippine flag was forbidden by the U.S. authorities until 1919.)

Two books with a short main title and a longer sub-title. By manipulating font size and kerning (inter-letter spacing), the words could be made to fit the available width. For 'The Mafulu', I didn't use the original frontispiece (to avoid some sensitivities when displaying a cover in some places).

Multi-volume Series

After making these covers, however, I decided to post this work as a single volume to PG. The number of cross-volume references, and in particular the index; since digital files do not have the size limitations of physical books, there is no reason to artificially split books into volumes.

This set, too, was merged to make processing the index and internal cross-references easier. Doing so also allows me to remove the Volume number from the cover, and thus gives me some more space to neatly position the devil's head with bird-nest. (Which also was on the original cover, and luckily available as an illustration inside the book as well, giving me a high-enough quality image to work with.)

Having created a combined set for a number of multi-volume works, I now decided to start with the combined cover, but then found out that this set doesn't lend itself to combining as well as the others (two separate indexes, etc.), so I was forced to re-design the cover for the separate volumes, which meant re-arranging some elements to fit the volume number a place. This also meant reducing the size of the graphic a little.