DARK Book Jacket

For this project, I designed a book dust jacket for the Netflix Original sci-fi series, DARK, and created a hand-lettered type for the main title. I focused on using type as an image, as well as tying the themes of the series into the form of the lettering.

Research

I began my process for designing the book jacket by researching the show through taking notes on motifs, important quotes, and general information. I later created a mood board using images from the show to get a sense of the show’s overall tone and color scheme.

My final choice for the type was based on the legibility of the word “DARK” and how the personality of the type aligned with the series.

Digitization

Sketching

After researching the book cover, I sketched the lettering for the main title “DARK”. I created a variety of sketches involving different layouts to help me figure out how my cover would be structured around the type.

Once I found which direction I wanted to take with the main lettering, I created additional sketches to explore variations of the type. The series itself delves into topics of time travel, interconnectedness, and deja vu, so I incorporated those themes into the form of the lettering by creating circular, modular characters.

When coloring the lettering, I considered how the letters overlapped, what the coloring would portray, and how I would balance between legibility and creativity. Part of the type that I also wanted to play with was the interaction between the type and the main character—at the end of the first part of the series, the main character steps through a portal. I experimented with the type to ensure legibility while still allowing for the type to serve as an image.

Printing

Lastly, I rearranged the characters to create a horizontal version of the type to fit the spine. I also made a pattern for the inside of the book jacket using the circular form of the lettering, which includes the motif of 3’s as seen in the show.

In my first round of printing, I was mainly concerned with how the book jacket would fit the book I used for size referencing and how the photos and type would appear to scale. I printed my first book jacket using mainly filler text in preparation for the final print. When printing my test print, I realized that the print did not print to scale and that the dimensions of my jacket would need to be extended slightly to fit around the book. Through critique, I took note of additional details that I could add to the jacket to make it more realistic.

Document for Round 1 Print

For my final print, I added the final details to my book jacket: price tags, author information and contact, stickers, and more. I adjusted the size of my final print to fit the size of the book I referenced.

Physical Copy of Round 1 Print

Document for Final Print

Now that I was satisfied with where my sketch for the lettering was, I moved onto vectorizing the type. I searched for places characters where the letterforms were similar, such as the stems, crossbars, and terminals, and used those as points to make the characters uniform to each other.

I chose to use images from the show depicting the main character of the series with similar color schemes and edited them to be uniform. I also selected additional typefaces for names and titles, as well as for my body copy.

Process

My process for this book cover can be broken down into research, sketching, digitization, and printing.