Portfolio
A Mind, A Will, A Way
This book is about John P. Henry, the man who designed many inventions, one of which was the Harvey Harvester, the machine that revolutionized the process of picking blueberries.
I was able to be in touch with Mr. Henry and he had kept many of his old blueprints and sketches for ideas he had worked on throughout the years. I wanted this cover to embody him and his work, so I used some of his old blueprint material, gathered some scans of his handwriting on different pages, and a corporate seal from one of his many companies and combined them all to create a book, that when spread brought the viewer in to his world before even reading his history.
The background is spread from the cover, across the spine, and to the back of the book and is made to resemble a smaller version of the blueprint/sketch paper he would work on for designs and ideas.
The cover has the boxes from these papers that one would write in the project name, descriptions, etc. but I took handwriting from tons of scanned papers to create the title and put in the author’s handwriting, and in lieu of the full author’s name on the book, it is shown by putting it in the box “Drawn By:” and followed by his initals, the way he would write them on every one of these sheets. There are also a few sketches on the cover to give an idea of just how small big ideas can be at the beginning of a project.
The pencil brings the eyes around the side of the book to the spine where the title is written in with his handwriting, then keeps moving around to the back of the book.
The back of this book is quite simple, this being a biography, I wanted to bring a lot of Mr. Henry’s life in to the entire jacket of this book design, without having to explain his life too much with words. This creates an appealing design to the eyes and also gets the viewer to open the book to find out more. The pencil ends around the back and at the end of it is the seal stamp that was used by one of his companies. Above this is just one single sketch, keeping things simple and intriguing.
After this book was completed, Mr. Henry gave his book to his family, this was his main plan the entire time. He wanted a book that he could be remembered by, a book that fully encompassed himself as a whole. I designed this cover with that in mind, I brought his personality and work ethic to this design, and it really brought it to life before even learning about the man himself.
