DIGITAL YOUTH: INNOVATION AND THE UNEXPECTED
A Book Layout & Design
In a graphic design class I was given the task of finding an open source book and creating a layout and a cover for it. The book that I chose, Digital Youth is about the effect of technology and the digital age on young people. For the design I took into account the young people that first were affected by the digital age. My inspiration is based on the look and feel of design of the mid to late 80s through the mid to late 90s. The neon colors were popular at the time. In the shadow of the image I chose to add noise representative of a non-digital television that no longer works in the digital age. The noise is representative of the dreaded "snowstorm screen." I included in the background of the image a series of 0s and 1s representative of digital code and frequencies. The woman in the picture is made up of PC boards.
COVER - Behind the Scenes
To come up with a book cover, I started with pencil and paper as I do in most of my projects. I did some quick (very rough draft) sketching and created concepts for a variety of covers. I decided that a cover with the organic hand drawn typography as hair was the most effective and moved on from there to take the concept to a digital format using Adobe Illustrator.
INTERIOR PAGES - Behind the Scenes
I wanted the feel of the cover of the book to continue within the opening pages. I chose a thick typeface (Impact) for my titles and headers so that I could use a mask to bring the PC Board into the type of the interior cover page. I also pulled elements of the digital numbers into my opening pages.