I’ve been working on the cover for a book titled, Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel. I spent the morning reading and researching around victorian designs, arts and crafts movement and looking at typefaces created during the Victorian era. The photographic nerve images are from an initial idea from the client, while the rest are iterations from my own sketches playing with the idea of thinking and analyzing thinking—which I precieve to be a meta experience. So, I started to play with boxes and repetition.
I got a surge of inspiration when I found old archival drawings from the original Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass books. The etching style created a beautiful juxtaposition to the clean vector silhouettes. I believe the strongest one is the all black and white that uses a chessboard illustration in the background. Chess is a comfortable metaphor for complex content of the book.
The light blue and amber/gray color palettes are eye dropped from patterns pulled from images I pulled from William Morris archives.
