Book cover design for my MFA Graphic Design thesis, DARK DESIGN: tool-breaking & the uncanny.
The book cover uses text texturally, producing a kind of cacophony of neon lights and noise reminiscent of the neon, dystopian futurism of Los Angeles 2019 in Blade Runner (1982).
Above: the back and front cover art.
I created this text in the spirit of tool-breaking, by using HTML to stack multiple accent characters on top of letters in a way that wasn't intended, but was oddly enough, design into the way HTML handles accented characters. This technique is called Zalgo.
Below: raw Zalgo text.
Elements of the cover are incorporated into the beginning and end of the book. At the beginning, the book cover design is "de-made" into the outlines of the vector paths on the cover.
At the end of the book, the words, "D/DAARRKK DDEESSIIGGNN" come into "focus" as a way to introduce the back cover art. This was created by increasing the size of the anchor points in the vector image.
