This was my original design. It is meant to be a detailed, close-up of a bicycle wheel. The feedback I received was that it wasn't clear that it was a bicycle wheel, it could be any wheel. So I played around with adding a bike pedal, a chain, and the parts of the bike that attach the wheel to the body. But nothing really quite looked right. So I decided I would just have to show the whole bike.
I decided to go with the idea of an old-fashioned bicycle, because 1) it looks nicer as cover art and 2) it's easier to create in illustrator. The problem was that I could figure out what to do with the bicycle after I created it. Having it ride down a spring scene road seemed BLAH, but it was getting to be too late at night and my brain was creatively exhausted. So I went home for the night.
The next morning I made this. I had initially steered clear of anything to do with plants and flowers because I thought it would be too overdone for spring. But I also felt like this was a different take on the idea. The problem with this spread was that no matter what type treatment I used and what color I used, nothing made those words on the wheels readable. So I had to come up with another concept.
Here I went for a steampunk/industrial theme. I sent this in for feedback, and was told the gears looked a little flat, and to select a different background color for a more cohesive theme.
which is how I ended up with this, the final product I turned in. I added gradients to the gears, went for a darker background color, and added some color variety to the gears.
After the class critique, I wish I had gone with an earlier version of my design. At lot of the things that were critiqued were things that I didn't originally have in my design. I wish I had went with the orange cover with the flat gears. Orange is brighter and creates more of a spring feel that everyone wanted in the design, and I was specifically told to make the gears look flat.
Next time I will go more with my intuition.
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