Jim Flora
Jim Flora was best-known for his wild jazz and classical album covers for Columbia Records and RCA Victor. Along with flourishing for decades as a busy magazine illustrator. And with this book/booklet, you can learn more about Jim Flora and his artistic journey throughout his life.
Moodboards
I crated three moodboards displaying three different approach for me to take for not only the book/booklet cover design but also spreads layout. The first moodboard on the top is a more elegant style, using shapes and a more balanced color palette. The second moodboard in the bottom left is a more simple style with a cute font choice and pastel palette. The last moodboard on the bottom right is a style more like Jim Flora’s style with bright color palette and unique font combine with a simple font. Through some feedback, I decided to go with the moodboard on the bottom right as it would help represent Jim Flora and his art style the best..
Overall Message
My overall message is to convey the mischievous and playfulness of Jim Flora's work, highlighting influence his work had on many either from his books or artworks. As well as to convey the fact that shapes, angles, colors, and cartoony can give a certain emotion or feeling.
Target Audience
Occupations are graphic designers, artists, designers, and cartoonists ranging from 20-50+ years old. Gender is both male and female with activities such as drawing, art research, designing, and animations. They are from mostly middle class from suburban to urban areas.
Cover Sketches
Using the moodboard, I began to create six cover sketches for the book/booklet using elements from Jim Flora’s art along with playing with the type placement. For the first three, I used the building from two of Jim Flora’s album covers while adding a few elements to it such as the cats in 1 and 3, and flames in 2. For Cover 4, I drew a scared dog looking away from the flames with a bird sitting on top of the type. While of 5 and 6, I drew drums out of place along with poppers to show a bit of chaos like some of the album covers.
Information
After sketching the front cover, I began work on collecting information about Jim Flora. The information includes the work he during his life, his jobs over the years and some background into his personal life, and what happened after his death. However, some of the information were shorten a bit to fit within a range so it would fit better in the limited amount of the spreads but sill have enough information to understand who Jim Flora is and what he’s done. I also pulled some quotes from the information that Flora had stated some point in his life to make sure they’re highlighted and a different color to the information. Along with creating some subheads for when certain parts of the information changes topics to help viewers understand better.
Book Layout & Layout Sketches
With the information gathered, I began work on the book/booklet’s layout since there was a lot of information going into it. First, I made a book layout showing how many pages were going to be present along with the covers, which in total is 16 pages, which is 7 spreads along with the insides of the front and back cover. Once the layout was planned, I made some sketches of possible layout options to work with since I wanted to also include pictures of Jim Flora’s work inside the book/booklet. For the first sketches, they are for a short quote that the artist had stated and a table of contents to navigate the book/booklet. While for the rest of the sketches, they are layouts that shows type placements along with images present and their layout and size.
F/B Cover Sketches
Using the feedback from the covers, I took cover sketches 1, 2, 3, and 5 to move forward with and a back cover while also refining the front cover. For cover 1, I added some building along with instruments and notes to make it look like a parade. Cover 2, I moved the type to be at the top and the cat to look like it was walking through the town with more buildings on the back with flames. Cover 3 has music notes attached to the flames to make it look like music is coming from the town. As for cover 4, I added more drums and explosions to seem like it’s a party.
Option #1
Using the feedback, I began designing the covers into a digital format with the color palette from the moodboard. For this design, I chose F/B covers 3 out of the options but added the cat playing an instrument from F/B cover 1 into the design. So option #1, I placed the cat on the back cover, which was a green background. For the cat and the drums, I used a burnt orange-red and a tan color with a bit of a darker shade of tan and burnt orange-red for the leg and lines. While the instrument and explosions are yellow with the cat and drums overlapping.
Option #2
In this F/B cover, It is similar to the first option in terms of the color palette, font, and design. But the main difference between this option and the first is the reddish-pink gradient on the background. This is to give the background a bit more life to it and give a 3D effect so the other elements stand out more.
Option #3
In this design, I went with the F/B cover 4, but like the other two options, I added the cat with the instrument to it. I placed the cat on the front cover to make it seem like the cat is walking through the town playing music. I made the background tan while the buildings, flames, notes, and cat are yellow, burnt orange-red, and green. But along with the established color palette, I added pink into the design as well to add more variety. I also used a different font for the type and have the type at the top of the cover.
Spread Drafts
After looking through the options, I went with option #3 as it felt more like something Jim Flora would make. Which means the spreads must match with the covers, so I gave the spreads had the same color palette as the covers and the font gave off the playful feeling. For this first set of drafts I made three spreads, the first spread being the table of contents while the last two spreads are with some of the information with the type being the same font. So, I made the subheads a bigger size and bold while making the body text a smaller size. For the background, I made it tan while the type is a burnt orange-red so they contrast with each other so it would be easier to read. Due to there being images present, I used a text wrap on the images to help the text flow better and not be overlapped by the images.
Digital Drafts
After receiving some feedback, I made edits to the cover by having the title be centered aligned, and changing the notes from pink to black and made the flames a bit smaller. Along with making the building that goes off the edge look like it was cut in half. For the spreads, I created more spreads so that there were a total of sixteen pages. And added yellow lines to page name in the table of contents to help guide the viewer’s attention. I then changed the body text to a dark gray color to show which text are subheads and which are body text and got rid of the space between the subheads and the body text. Along with enlarging the images and adding new ones to some of the pages, while also making sure to increase the text wrap to give more space between the text and images.
Final
For the final, I changed the font for the subheads to a serif, while for the body text, it was changed to a sans serif so they would better balance each other. On the table of contents page, I turned the title sideways and placed on the left, and got rid of the yellow lines and had the page names closer together. I also shorten the text boxes in each of the spreads to have some space at the top of the book/booklet. As well as making the type size for the body text smaller and adding some even space between paragraphs and subheads to read better. The images were then enlarged even more so that way the images no longer looked like they were being cut off, and the text warp was now present on one side so the text will flow better.