Over time, I’ve realised the efficiency of flowcharts in the process of articulation (such as in briefs) and ideation relative to mind maps. I thus used a combination of both to create makeshift brief to base my work on. The research part of this wasn’t very “intensive” it was just matter of looking up some travel guides that I’d already seen while browsing stuff to read in some bookstores. Ironically, those Travel Guides didn’t seem to have too much sophistication when it came to the development of the jacket, and these were the most popular ones. So the benchmark was already rather low when it came producing something interesting for the cover.

And the next part of creating the brief was figuring out what you’d typically expect to see on a Travel Guide to confirm its reliability in terms of navigating a given city. Now, creating all of these would take forever, and would additionally put a lot of pressure visually on the reader. Also I wanted to create something a lot less grand in style, as having a skyline on the cover would end up making it, at least in my experience. Having everything seem manageable and keeping just a few elements rather than completely fill up the space would give the reader a lot more breathing space. So I limited the composition of the front cover to three elements and a bit of supporting text which may include a logo.

I then started researching book jacket dimensions. This was a more of a logical assumption, calculating the jacket dimensions using the measurements of a good, rectangular book layout.

Next I began researching the places I had to create guides for. Starting with Istanbul. I started researching three particular aspects – a monument, a local dish and an popular icon, so the probably flag icon for the third. I also ended up creating my own font for this assignment as well, something I’d picked in my two years of graphic design school. The handwritten aspect made it allthemore convenient, I actually did not end up using anything other than my font. While I did end up using placeholder text in the back part of the cover. Creating the icons was interesting to say the least, because I did not want to spend too much time on these smaller illustrations, so I extended the handwritten aspect to the drawing part as well.

A bit of editing on the icons allowed me to use multiple versions of the same icon in the same jacket. I did this with the blue mosque, where I used the shapes of the illustration in the front cover and the line drawing at the back.

I didn’t quite like the end result in this though, especially because, despite the hand-drawn intention, the work was rather sloppy, and the colour choice was poor. I decided to improve these aspects in the next cover, which was for Milan.

Milan’s cover involved adding a bit more spice to the artwork. At this point I’d understood a very clear relationship between me, time and the artwork. In a process where I’m trying to minimise the effort and thought I put into an artwork to preserve its simplicity while also retaining its resemblance to the original image, time and the level of detail are directly proportional. So Milan’s travel guide saw me spending a bit more time on development of the monument icon, which in this case was Il Duomo. The end result was a rather Quentin Blake-esque. As a personal preference, I added an icon of a medievel helmet to represent the Poldi-Pelozzi Museum, something that gets me excited because of my love for the Dark Souls trilogy by the game development company From Software.

By far the best cover, the Helsinki jacket had a simpler colour scheme and more interesting shapes to look at. I decided to thus use this cover for the mockup.