It’s that time of the semester again, essay hand-in day; this time known as Design Report One, with part two set to follow next year. This time around we were allowed to do something a bit fancy with it, rather than just the good ol’ A4 classic look. I didn’t want to go over the top with it, mostly to keep the content of the essay prominent, rather than have it lost in the design.

As you can probably guess, my main topic for discussion was book covers. Generally, the essay talks about why books are given new covers every few years and how their relationship with the contents compares to that of album sleeves and DVD covers. One of my main case studies is the classic Penguin covers we are all so familiar with so I thought making my design report seem like it bore one would be nice idea.

I ended up with two “formats” for lack of a better word. The first was your traditional A4 style essay.

It was typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro, only a slight variation on my usual Garamond but well, it works. I’ve always preferred to use serif fonts for essays and such, they seem a lot more formal and sophisticated in my opinion. I have seen some very pretty essays in Helvetica though.

My second copy wasn’t quite so successful. It’s essentially the same as the first, but in Penguin’s classic ‘A format’ of 181 x 111 mm. I would have loved to have gotten it professionally bound and printed as a wee paperback but printing problems led to time contraints that led to me printing the cover myself (making it much poorer quality than the A4′s Bob Scott produced gloss print) and settling for spiral binding. It looks not bad really, although the margins are clearly too small but I’m pleased with the full page images.

It could be worse for a day or two’s planning and I’m just hoping it’s not all style and no substance. I’d like to think it isn’t, but at least I only have a two month wait for my grade.