The problem with some recent covers is that they either - had no meaning (not even implied), they where just marble textures. - or where too culturally centered, showing some scripts or a specific projection of the Earth - I have sent a proposal something that is culturally neutral, it evokates a chart of characters, but not using any actual glyph, and suggesting some maps with continents/islands, but not real maps, and easily scalable/croppable at any resolution (It should be noted that the edition will have several volumes and that the central vertical part of the image may be variable. as well I avoided implying an horizontal or vertical layout, placing the grid at uneven angles (about 30 degrees so that it scales smoothly without visible artefacts). Also the pattern used is never repeated (all tiles are unique but share some common general aspect, as if it was a regular structure, but still irregular shapes, never twice the same but still aligning cleaning with a semi-regular structure). I was inspired by the beautiful blue mosaics I saw in Portugal.
You may of course have other ideas. But characters endoded in Unicode are now very rich (and the glyphs for representing them and combining them are even more rich if we also add the introduction of significant colors). And the general principle was that this was just a background texture that should not obscure the text/titles put on top of it (so it should have low contrasting lines, and should be mostly unicolor, and reasonably dark or pale, still attractive (avoiding low saturation levels of grays). As several concepts are requested for several editions, we may vary these ideas/concepts, including on the central cover border area, where the Unicode logos and titles in smaller fonts should also be clearly distinctive. As well the fine prints (e.g. name of the editor, or a small abstract text on the background side (left part of the suggested image canvas), without necessarily having to map an uniform background panel on it (an uniform white rectangle will be needed for getting a clear black&white barcode, and such insert should be also not more distractive to the titles, meaning that the titles will most probably be white if we want to avoid the uniform background behing them, and this suggests a moderately dark or medium-light colored texture). Some photos may be used of course, or some assembly. but it's hard to predict the exact placement/centering of the photo if the cover size must be adapted to the effective size of the central border area (depending on the number of pages of each volume and the quality/grammage of paper used for printed pages in the book). Given the small diffusion of the book and its price, I think that cheap paper will be used to limit production costs and allow "printing on demand" by publishers (or directly by some online resellers such as Amazon, if they is permitted to print books themselves via their partner publishers in the world, to save expedition costs and storage costs). It is also very likely that most sales could be now for electronic editions. Complex patterns of contrasting lines should be limited to not cover the whole area and should still allow easy placement of large titles, at their placement suggested by the described template, and should avoid touching the central vertical area (border cover) as well as some places needed for usual small prints. 2018-03-12 15:30 GMT+01:00 Andre Schappo via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>: > > One of my project students has an art gallery as a client ➜ > surfacegallery.org This gallery is also a focal point for a collective of > local artists. > > This morning I had a project meeting with this student. I suggested that > surface gallery artists might like to submit entries. > > I showed the Unicode character set to the student and she was well > impressed. I also suggested possible cover design art. > > The basic principle of my suggestions was that the artwork should be > constructed from Unicode characters and only Unicode characters. My > suggestions included: plants, animals, portraits, cityscape, zoo, farm > ...etc... If the artists collective use my suggestions then the unicode > cover artwork they submit will most definitely feature Unicode. > > Recent Unicode cover artwork has not featured Unicode (well not in any way > that I can determine) and I think it should and it should feature it > prominently and obviously. > > I do not know who or how the artwork is judged but I think it would be > good if members of this list could vote on the submitted cover artwork. > > André Schappo > > > > >