Penguin Brief: Emil And The Detectives: Format Issues

PROBLEMS I FACED 

TEMPLATE 
I really struggled with the template given to us. It took me a long time to figure out how to get the template to be on top of my design without including its own white space. This slowed the process down a lot and others struggled with this too. Once we had cracked it, it made it faster to move on.

CHARACTER POSITIONING 
I also struggled with how to position my characters and which ones to use, I traced over all of them in photoshop from my sketchbook pages. When placing them in they all felt very static, once I had introduced the coral and blue background it made it better but having them all positioned upright posed a problem both spatially (where was I going to put the type?) and aesthetically (did they all look ugly straight up?). 
I removed all of the drawings and placed them on separate layers, hid them all and decided to place the text first. Once I had done this, it made it easier to rotate them around. Most of the characters/objects I had at a tilt. I personally felt it looked quite messy but my peers all insisted that it was playful and made it interesting to look at. I felt like the type was quite easily lost behind these things, so I lessened the amount of characters/objects and angled them to draw attention to certain places (policeman pointing at Authors name and Emil running towards his name). As well as this I decided to silhouette a lot of my drawings, I did this because there was a lot of things going on in the design already. I kept things like the chocolate bar and the statue just outlined, but characters I decided to silhouette so that way children could use their imagination to think about what the character might look like. It also made the whole cover much neater. 

TYPEFACE
Although one of the things mentioned in the brief was type, it wasn't something I spent ages on (on reflection if I had I think there would be a different outcome). I created some ink text and traced over this but it felt very stiff and not playful at all. To overcome this I decided to have a go on one of the Cintiq's at college (not something I had very much experience with). It really helped to overcome it, from it I got nice pen marks and decided to have 'Emil' hand written with a consistent text underneath for both the authors name and the back panel. 

RGB to CYMK

As it came up to submission time, I realised I had made a big error in the fact I had created the book cover in RGB and had not read the brief to the tiniest detail (it needed to be a CYMK file). This was a big blunder for me, when I converted the file I was very lucky that the colours did not differ massively but the lighter coral wasn't as bright and neither was the blue. I still had time to change these but I learnt a big lesson that day - ALWAYS read the brief to the tiniest detail.