Book cover for Victor H. Cahalane’s “Mammals of North America”
For this book cover, I redesigned “Mammals of North America” by Victor H. Cahalane from the 1960’s. Since the book was made so long ago, my intention was to create a modern day cover and table of contents. For the cover I wanted to feature animals since that is the focus of the book, so I chose two of the most recognizable animals from North America - the red fox and the whitetail deer.
Table of Contents
This project also included re-designing the table of contents. Since this book had a lot of sections and items in the table of contents, I wanted to make a system that would be easy to navigate. The system I came up with was to represent each section with the track of the corresponding animal group. Most animals I used the prints for, although for some I chose to use more iconic and easily recognizable imagery to distinguish the sections.
Production
In addition to designing the cover and table of contents, I also made the design into a book jacket that would fit the actual book. To do this, I got the dimensions of each side of the book and created a simple die line in Illustrator. From there, I printed and tested the die line to make sure it fit the book. Once the die line was made to the correct dimensions, I got to work on designing. After some preliminary sketches, I decided to move forward with this design. Once completed, the cover was printed on a matte cardstock and the interior table of contents pages were printed on a semi-gloss regular weight paper.