Cover Influence
Book covers are designed to catch the eye and brand the book. Good covers hook the intended audience. Good covers communicate that they are part of a series. When you are working on a graphic design project related to a book, let the cover guide your design.
Adopted Elements
How to break up with your phone by Catherine Price, is this years pick for the Tuscarawas County One Book One Community. The minimal bold cover design was easy to draw design elements from. I adopted the colors of yellow, light blue, white and black text, a sanserif font, all caps titles, and speech bubble motif. I repeated these elements through all the marketing materials created for One Book One Community. No matter what project you are working on, if it has multiple parts work hard to keep your design consistent so that it is instantly relatable to each other piece of branding.
Good design takes time.
The initial designs for the trifold brochure, 11x17 poster, 8.5x11 flyer, and bookmark took 7 hours of concentrated work. I am not sure how much time I spent on the entire project, since I was working on it intermittently for weeks. After the initial promotional materials there were the #Tuscunplugs passport, social media posts, individual event flyers, several iterations of the bookmark...
And numerous edits.
Can we move this information to the backside, do we have room to add these events, what if we reworded this section, can we do it in blue? Editing is what makes your designs better, so this stage is very important. Having someone be able point out problems or suggest alternatives is awesome! I used to think I didn't want to do graphic design work because I would be too sensitive about my work, but it turns out I can handle it and I appreciate the feedback. I feel like I am working through a design and communication problem and having people to puzzle over the problem with me helps.
What is One Book One Community?
I'll just quote the description we use in our promotional materials, specific to my county. "One Book, One Community is a grassroots reading movement that aims to bring people together by giving them a shared experience. When we all read the same book we have something to talk about. One Book One Community's goal is to break down the barriers between different groups of people and to strengthen Tuscarawas County."
In my county each library sends a representative to be on the OBOC committee. Every year the committee chooses a socially relevant book and sometimes a picture book companion to involve younger children. In 2016 I was on the committee when we picked the Christmas Jars by Jason F. Wright.
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