Cover design in book binding

Books are the ladder of human civilization's progress. The wisdom of human beings accumulates, spreads and continues, relying on books. Books give people knowledge and power. The ancients once said, “If you don’t study on the 3rd, you will find the language is odorless, and your face can be defamatory”. It shows how much education can be used as a spiritual diet to enlighten people. The existence of a book as a carrier for text and graphics cannot be frameless. The binding of the book is a harmonious unity. It should be said that what kind of book has what kind of binding to fit it. In China, book design is usually called book design or book design.

The cover design plays a decisive role in the overall design of the book. The book meets readers and the first round depends on the cover. The cover is the face of a book. It is a salesman who does not speak. A good cover design can not only attract readers, make them love at first sight, but also intriguing and put it down. The quality of the cover design is of great significance to the social image of the book. For this reason, as an art teacher of a vocational school, I made some preliminary discussions on the cover design of books. The cover design generally includes the title, author name, publisher name, etc., as well as the content, nature, decorative image of the genre, color, and composition.

First, the concept design of the cover:

First of all, it should establish that the form of performance should be the form of content service of the book, with the most touching, most visual, and most visually acceptable forms of expression. Therefore, the concept of the cover is very important. It is necessary to fully understand the connotation and style of the manuscript. Genres, etc., make the idea novel, relevant and contagious. The conceptual process and method can roughly have the following methods:

1, imagine:

Imagination is the basic point of conception. Imagination, centering on the perception of styling, can produce a clear and meaningful image. The inspiration we are talking about is the accumulation and crystallization of knowledge and imagination. It is an open source for design ideas.

2. Discard:

The conceptualization process is often “superimposed and easy to abandon”. It often takes a lot of thought when it comes to conceiving, stacks up a lot, and does not tolerate the extra details. Mr. Zhang Guangyu said that "doing more subtraction and less doing addition" is a real experience. For unimportant, dispensable images and details, resolutely reluctantly cut love.

3, symbol:

The symbolic technique is the language with the most powerful artistic expressions. The utensils are like images to express abstract concepts or artistic conceptions. The abstract images can also be used to express concrete things and can be accepted by people.

4, explore innovation:

Popular forms, commonly used techniques, and mundane language should be avoided as much as possible; familiar concept methods, common composition, and customary skills are the enemy of innovative ideas. To be innovative, you need to be unconventional and unconventional. To have creative ideas, we must have a tireless spirit of exploration.

Second, the cover of the text design:

In addition to the title of the cover text, all use the printed fonts, so here I mainly introduce the font of the title. The fonts commonly used in book titles fall into three categories: calligraphy, art and print.

1. Calligraphy:

Calligraphy strokes pursue endless changes, with a strong artistic appeal and distinct national characteristics and unique personality. The handwritings are mostly from social celebrities, have a celebrity effect and are widely loved. Books and magazines such as "Seeking Truth" and "Doll Pictorial" have adopted calligraphy as the name of the book.

2. Art body:

Art can be divided into two types: regular art and irregular art. The former, as the mainstream of the art, emphasizes the regularity of appearance, and the unity of points and changes, which is easy to read and easy to design, but it is more rigid. Irregular art is different in this respect. It emphasizes free deformation, and it is characterized by a variety of changes from point to point processing or font outlines, with rich changes, outstanding personality, sufficient design space, strong adaptability, and rich decorative features. Compared with the rules of art and calligraphy, irregular art has a personality and adaptability. Therefore, many books and magazines use such fonts, such as "Friends" and "NEWYORK" abroad.

3, printing:

The printed body follows the characteristics of a regular art body. The earlier printing body was stiffer and stiffer. Now the printing body has made breakthroughs in this aspect, absorbing irregular rules of irregular art bodies, and greatly enriching the expressiveness of the printing body. With a computer, the print processing method is convenient and rich, making up for its lack of personality. Publications such as "Yulin" and "TIME" use print as the name of the book.

Some domestic book publications combine Chinese and English titles in the design to create a unique decorative effect. Such as “World Knowledge Pictorial” uses “W” and Chinese titles to form its own style. The visual image of the title is not static and can only be expressed in a single font, color, or font size. It is refreshing to combine two or more fonts, colors, and font sizes. For example, the title “Merry Generation” combines the calligraphy body and the printing body together to create a strong contrast effect between the two different shape features. Another example is that the title of "Love Marriage and Family" magazine adopts two font sizes and rhythm arrangement in two colors, and small characters and large characters combine to make changes.

Third, the cover of the picture design:

The cover picture is an important part of the design elements because of its intuitive, clear, visually powerful, and easy to resonate with readers. The content of the picture is rich and colorful, the most common being people, animals, plants, natural scenery, and the products of all human activities.

The picture is an important part of the book cover design. It often occupies a large area in the picture and becomes a visual center, so the picture design is particularly important. The general youth magazines and women's magazines are casual books and magazines. Its standard is the aesthetic of the public. Usually, the popular movie singers and models are selected as the cover; the criteria for selection of popular science publications is intellectual, and often used in connection with nature. The pictures of scientific and technological achievements; while sports magazines select sports stars and arena pictures; news magazines select news figures and related scenes, and its standards are neither young and beautiful, nor are they scientific knowledge, but news values; the cover of photography and art publications. Choose excellent photography and artistic works. Its standard is artistic value.

Fourth, the cover color design:

The color processing of the cover is an important aspect of the design. Appropriate color performance and artistic processing can produce eye-catching effects in the reader's vision. The use of color needs to take into account the needs of the content, using different color contrast effects to express different content and ideas. In the comparison, we seek unity and coordination, and it is advisable to configure each other in terms of color, so that the contrast colors are unified in coordination. The color of the title must have a certain amount of weight on the cover. If the purity is not enough, it cannot produce a dramatic effect. In addition to the painting color used for the cover, it can also use decorative colors. The color of the literary book cover may not be suitable for textbooks, and the cover color of textbooks and theoretical books is not suitable for children's books. To see the meaning of color dialectically, it cannot be used metaphysically.

In general, the color of infant journals should be designed to be delicate, simple, naive, and cute. Tones are often treated as high-profile, weakening contrasts and emphasizing soft feelings; the color of women's books can be based on the characteristics of women. Choose gentle, charming, and elegant color series; sports magazine's colors emphasize the impact of stimulating, contrasting, and pursuing color; and the colors of art magazines require a rich connotation, and there must be depth, avoid frivolity, kitsch; The colors can emphasize the mystery; the color of the fashion magazines should be trendy and full of personality; the color of professional academic magazines should be dignified, serious and elegant, and reflect the sense of authority, and the contrast ratio of high purity should not be emphasized.

In addition to coordination of color configuration, we must pay attention to the relationship of color, including the contrast of hue, purity, and brightness. There is no contrast between hue and warmth on the cover, and you feel a lack of enthusiasm; there is no contrast in brightness on the cover, you feel boring and emaciated; there is no clear contrast in purity on the cover, you will feel ancient peace and customs. We must master the relationship of lightness, purity, and hue in the color design of the cover, and at the same time use these three relationships to understand and find the causes of the defects on the cover, in order to improve color cultivation.

Above, I talked about the design method of the four basic elements of the book cover design. To order these elements in a single picture, we can form the cover of the book. Grasping the basic methods of cover design must not be applied dogmatically, but must be targeted in order to design an excellent book cover so that readers can fall in love at first sight.