Designing a romantic (love triangle) novel cover.
March 2017- May 2017
2 Month
Pen, Pencil, Sketchbook
Adobe Illustrator
Cover Designer, haha
Social Media Manager
Nilesh Sharma (Author), Zainab Siddiqui (English Version Author)
Vipin Sir(Ninja Hindi Typist) and Me (Designer)
I am very fortunate enough to work on this amazing project. This got very close to me. I got to work with some wonderful people whom I learned a lot on the way of designing a beautiful cover that is being loved by thousands and appreciated by my teammates, Mr. Irritating Team and those who come around this novel. The novel narrates the story of three characters Kavya, Anant and Aashi and of course their friendship, career and love triangle between them.
Love it or hate it, the fact is people do judge a book by its cover.
Designing novel cover is both fun and challenging. Because the interiors of most novels are unadorned continuous typography I think you have to take a lot of care to balance the elements of the page to get the best effect.
Margins, line leading, choice of fonts get more critical since the aim of the designer is to enable the reader to be carried along by the author's story.
We came to conclusion that the cover should be something that directly tell the brief about the romantic story. The novel should stand out and attracts passing by people when kept on shop. the colour, typography and character styling, their background story.
Love it or hate it, the fact is people do judge a book by its cover.
It was important for me to design a cover that narrates the story in just a blink of an eye and in doing so also connects the deeper part of young age (specially college students), the lovers.
Anant is an ordinary shy boy hailing from Varanasi. He has just come to
Lucknow to pursue his engineering and finds everything very different to him. He never thought that this place would hold such an important place in his life.
While in his first semester, his eyes capture a girl who turned his world upside down. He’s gripped by love at first sight and begins to follow his desire for his beloved Aashi, blindly.
Every day, there is a round table discussion on love and it’s side effects. His
enthusiastic friends help him with their expert advices. Everything is very pleasant in the beginning.
With the passage of days, he manages to win her friendship but inside he was madly in love with her.
One of his close friends, Kavya happens to help him build his confidence and in the process, she falls for him.
After few days, he finds out that the girl he loved, already had a boyfriend and considers Anant a bit irritating. This breaks him. Anant actually loved her enough to let her go.
Kavya is senior to him, frank, bold and pure hearted girl, who had always been at Anant’s backend.
Anant resists forgetting Aashi, while Kavya is always ready to move mountains for him. Thus, Anant struggles between love,friendship and career. Mr. Irritating is the journey of the three, in pursuit of their true love.
Is it so hard to win over your first love?
Will life never stop playing strange games?
Can love be found from unexpected places?
Well, somethings are better left unsaid. Love has its own way of troubling people. It is capable of making you and breaking you. Presenting to you a roller coaster ride with amazing twists and turns.
Mr. Irritating shall not irritate you!
Initial ketches.
So after some sketching and basic idea, I began working on creating characters outline, The idea was to have character of Anant, Aashi and Kavya on book cover with triangle scenario between them and placing heart somewhere.
The idea was to have character of Anant, Aashi and Kavya on book cover with triangle scenario between them and placing heart somewhere 😍.
After sorting things out, getting a scenario and sketch I began to draw the outline of the sketch in Adobe Illustrator. In a way I also created a background depicting the stages of a love cycle and a heart to put it all together. Coming to typography, initially played around with different font grouping two font together and here and there. Turned out the these fonts tuned up the scenario Moon font and heading font.
The best friend of Mr.Irritating. She is modern, bold girl. A guitarist, a basketball player and loves to wonder on her scooty. She hangs out with boys, unlike other girls who chit chat, much to dislike of Anant. As the story progresses, she become more than a friend for him, with her unconditional support. However, the feelings come to notice off to late.
Anant, is a shy guy hailing from Banaras who comes down to Lucknow to pursue engineering. He finds his love on the stairs of collage one fine day and spends his time on getting to her. He finds love and friendship, then looses both, embracing disillusionment!
Aashi is deeply loved by Mr. Irritating. She is a sweet and bubbly girl, with limited friends. She has a reserved nature and looks beautiful in indian attires. As Anant confesses his love, she accepts it, becoming his strength through the thick and thin of collage life. However, in the end misunderstandings develop and she leaves him without a word.
Later on I also worked on marketing material, I designed flex and many posters also designed their promotional post for Facebook and Instagram.
Despite all request and discussion the publisher did one thing I still hate. He Made the final prints cover background Pure Red by increasing contrast to Overall the cover. In a way changing all visual. Anyway that worked out. For the better? Yes? Could have been even more better? Yes.
Sometimes we have to be okk with the changes that is being approved at the end, despite you know it's not the best for your users.
You can irritate me though, by clapping just one times.