Oliver Sacks Musicophilia book cover

Type as a graphic element

I overlayed words that come to mind when thinking about the book, over an overlay of a violin over part of the inkblot. 

Finished Book Cover!

Book Cover

Final front cover design

Final book cover dust jacket design

Other variations of the design

Research for final idea

I decided to look at the Rorschach test cards. The Rorschach test is a psychological test where patients are shown inkblot images on cards and asked what the image means to them. It's used to detect underlying thought disorders, and to analyse a persons personality characteristics and emotional functioning. When someone sees any of these images it makes them think of psychology, so I think it's a good strong image to use on a book cover about psychology.

Rorschach test images

I drew these music notes in Illustrator and overlayed them on my rorschach image

I used this image of a violin as an overlay

I used a photo of my MP3 player as another overlay

This is my illustration based on the Rorschach inkblot

overlayed with my illustrations of music notes

First idea development

Music and the mind

I wanted the violin to be made off neurons escaping the brain, with neurons oozing out in drops. And I was going to make the brain out of music notes. The whole chimera thing had me stumped and I kept falling into the hole of making the brain out of objects, like music notes or neurons. When I was working on it in photoshop it started to look quite violent and strange, and didn't illustrate what the book is about. So I scraped this, went back to looking at other popular psychology books and saw that I needed to make a cover that looked elegant and sophisticated to fit in with the genre.

Sketched ideas

Popular Psychology books

Here's some examples of popular psychology books.

 

A lot of the books have quite subdued colours, and simple images. A popular feature is an image of the author on the front cover. I decided I'll use black and white for the cover.

More images I find inspiring

Your brain on art - Joseph Juy - diffusion spectrum imaging

 

Tripping through Bogomils mind - Otto Rapp

 

 

 Tangled Neurons

 

Neuron

 

Neuron network

 

mirror neuron

 

 

 

 

Sound wave

 

 

 

 

 

 brain and neuron

 

 

Crazy Brain

 

I have a road less travelled in mind

 

Meishin Final - Thomas Gianni

 

Menomena - Friend and foe

 

 

Olly Moss

Brain - Jerry Rhodes