Book Jacket Design
Design Thinking and Pedagogy is a book cover I was tasked with creating for a book written by Yulin Wang. I decided to follow the direction of his eastern roots to really center the book jacket design on Yulin's culture that is also reflective of his art style.
The book jacket depicts a few interesting symbols within the design. The first two are quite obvious: The dragon and the snake. The third however, is not as noticeable. It is the little lotus flower pattern on snake's forehead.
In eastern culture the dragon, snake and lotus flower all have symbolic meanings. I chose to incorporate these symbolic meanings within my work. It is said that the dragon is the most prominent of all the zodiac animals in terms of their strengths, ambitions and humility. Snakes on the other hand are said to to be full of knowledge, or very wise in their ways. The lotus symbolizes rebirth and beauty.
Snake + Dragon = a wise and ambitious Yulin Wang.
How do these meanings fit into the design of the book jacket? The dragon symbolized an ambitious Yulin who never stopped short of his goals. The wise snake represents the knowledge Yulin had gained from careful observation of his subjects. The lotus flower represents the unique beauty Yulin captures in his works, especially the canvases from his painting series, Boya Haogu.
Inspiration Behind the Design
I remembered this poster that was posted on the bulletin boards in the Cultural Centre from my first year in college. I remember thinking how interesting this composition was, with a circular center piece design balanced by the bold, beautiful Chinese brush script font. I did not think I would ever find inspiration with this wonderful poster designed by Yulin Wang himself for a project of my own a year later.
The Time Space Legacy Poster was a poster for his new series of canvas paintings created at the time, titled Boya Haogu, all painted by Yulin Wang himself.
Process behind the Design
The book jacket was created on Illustrator with a lot of reference images used as a template for the dragon, snake, clouds and lotus flower. Further manipulation to the outlined reference images converted them to become more stylistic and also much more unified in terms of the style. I also worked with transparencies and gradients to add depth to the design as well as visual interest.
The extra addition of the Chinese text I added would have not been possible if it were not for my Instructor, Yulin, since I could not find any translating app that could translate English text properly into the traditional Chinese text that I added as a secondary title for the jacket design.
