Rationale

The task was to create a type design for the cover of the book that I will be illustrating.

Firstly, when  had the basic idea of what I'm looking for, I started to draw scamps of my type designs. I started off with a clean, straight, sans serif typeface, starting off with using only capital letters.

Once I had my basic idea down, I decided to experiment with type size, contrast and the way it's positioned. I still decided to stick to capital letters only because it gave a sleek and clean look to the title. I flipped and changed the size 'the' and 'Doerr' for contrast.

The book title 'The Deep' brings out an image of the water and the ocean/the sea so I thought about using ink instead of biro pen. I used watered down ink with a paint brush to give a more watery effect on the page and it turned out well so I decided to stick with ink.

I thought to experiment with water and ink, so I decided to draw out a typeface design with ink and paintbrush and once it's dry, I splattered water on it to see what effect it would give out. I added another neat layer of ink over the first layer to bring out the words again. It gave a very different effect than other designs and it kept the idea of water and the ocean.

I carried on trying out different designs with ink and paintbrush. After playing around with sans serifs and paintbrushes, I went on to cursive which gave a very neat effect. It also brought out the idea of 'old school', since the book is set in 1914 Detroit.

I thought about moving away a little bit from cursive, sans serif etc, and decided to experiment with completely different designs. I tried out putting the title in a bubble which turned out looking well, but it wasn't something that I was looking for. I also tried dotted typeface, curled and only half of the letters. It looked a lot different from the other designs that i tried out, and it gave contrast to my scamp sheet.

At last, I decided to try out different tools and I went for dip pens of different thickness. I have tried out a flat, thick dip pen and I liked the look of it so I decided to use it with cursive and that's what I decided to use as a final typeface design for my book cover because it gave an 'old school' look which I liked from the start which also looked neat and clean.