Jenny's Cover

I'm working on a book cover for Teachers College Press right now and was hoping to get a little feedback. The book is about a girl who didn't quite fit into the mold of the elementary school system of a diverse, urban school. She had some bumps along the way, hence the slightly creased paper theme. I've gone through a bunch of iterations and this is kind of where I am. I originally was working with the title above her head (or perhaps on top and behind her head...) but it felt like it was pressing down on her. I'm not entirely comfortable with the placement of all the elements, and am still tweaking but thought I'd put it up. I'm not sure people are still checking out blogs but just in case, feedback would be lovely. Thanks.

Front Matter

I'm trying to resolve the front matter and the pacing of the start of the book and hoping to get some feedback (in part so I can then design the table of contents). I reduced a combined a few pages so it's not so slow and the preface is still going to get much longer to explain where the project is going. The interests map is still going to have the vellum layer which is going to mute those colors and I think my only real concern is that I feel like I need sometime between the Community Clusters pager and The City. All in my head or do I need something transitional there? I think the TOC will be a good transition between the interests map and the Community Clusters. Anyone have suggestions?

Thoughts?

So I've been trying to combine all the maps from my three sections and have come up with two variations, one keeping the bright colors and one going for a more muted tone with slight pops of color ala the greyscale interests map. Does anyone have a preference? (now that the grey is done, I'm leaning towards it since it moves away from the three other colorful ones and transitions into the Process section...) The left hand page is still just filler of course...
thanks.

Thought I'd put these up. There are the (quiet) transitions between the city, art and food sections. Like previously in the book, the lines will be printed on vellum overlaying the detail on the "interests map."

I haven't uploaded anything to my blog in a while so I thought I'd put some stuff up. He we have the title page and the "faux" title page and a few of the end spreads for each section. The copy still needs to be written for these but I've made a rough draft of the copy for the food. I've also starting working on a map that encompasses all three of these maps but have been having a little trouble making all the colors mesh together. Maybe drop back into the gray palette I established for the start of the book? More to talk about tomorrow.

start of poems

Here's the first "poem" I'm happy-ish with. Keep pushing it?


Here's two more, the top one was my first attempt and then because I liked the China one, I went back and redid it with lighter, thinner type but for comparison's sake, I thought I'd put both up. I like the colors but think maybe it's too jumbled and distracting. Thoughts?




Another, this time with colored text...once again kind of liking the soft colors... but feel like the text needs more...greater shift in scale? different typeface?

not finished yet....

So I haven't been able to finish the designing of the spreads yet but I thought I'd put up a couple of the illustrations. I'm envisioning "stories" next to the images explaining how these people and ideas are influential and maybe a timeline running across the spreads but I don't quite think it's all going to get dropped into place by tomorrow night so here's something to look at in the meantime.