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Vector artwork is everywhere these days, and book jackets are no exception. Often striking in their simplicity, vector graphics and illustration can stand out in a sea of photo-based covers on the bookshelf. As I looked through cover designs of the past few years, certain themes emerged. I have identified four, which I'll call: Silhouettes, Pattern & Decoration, Abstraction and Type With A Twist. In addition, there are a few covers that feature beautiful full-on vector illustration. Barring a conversation with the designer, we cannot be certain that these covers were drawn with Illustrator, et al. But they all have a look that could easily be achieved with a vector drawing program. Be sure to click on the illustrators' links and get inspired!

Silhouettes

Black paper cutout portraits became popular as an aristocratic amusement in the late 18th century. The term "silhouette" was coined from the name of a French finance minister and practitioner of the art, Etienne de Silhouette. The word now refers to anything that looks like a shadow or cut-out of a person or object. Silhouettes can have both a historical reference and a modern feel. Their anonymity makes them at once recognizable and universal. Here are some examples:

"English As She is Spoke" Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino (Authors), Paul Collins (Editor)
Designer: Alvaro Villanueva
In 1855, Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrase book for Portuguese students. The problem was, they didn't know any English. The silhouettes and speech bubbles on the cover convey the unintended humor of this classic re-edition.

"Sharp Teeth" by Toby Barlow
Designer: Christine Van Bree
The arresting silhouette of a fierce dog is a great fit with this thriller, which follows three packs of feral dogs in East Los Angeles.

"The Silver Linings Playbook" by Matthew Quick

Designer: Mother Design

"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

Designer: Pete Garceau
Visually arresting and conveys perfectly the theme of the book.

Pattern & Decoration

Vector drawing programs are an excellent tool for making patterns and symmetrical designs. A quick flip of an object can create a mirror image in an instant. Here are some symmetrical patterns and other decorative covers:

"Wicked Plants" by Amy Stewart

Designer: Alvaro Villanueva

This vintage-looking cover brings to mind a garden gate, with a twisted pattern reminiscent of a weed or vine.

Some of the most beautiful patterned covers of late are the Penguin Classics Hardcover series, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Read an interview with her here.
The covers are collected in a Flickr set.

Abstraction

In the following designs, the concepts and illustrations have been reduced to their most essential elements. The results are bold, eye-catching graphics.

Type With A Twist

Typography alone can make for an arresting book jacket design. On the following covers, the artists use type in unexpected and clever ways:

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer
Designer: Gray318

Full Vector Illustration

Again, while we can't be certain that all of these covers were drawn with Illustrator, or other vector software, they are all striking in their hand-made quality. Let's hope that a vector trend continues in book cover design!

"Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers
Illustrator: Rachell Sumpter

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann
Illustrator: Matteo Pericoli

"Real World Illustrator CS4" by Mordy Golding
Illustrator: Von Glitschka

All covers are the copyright of their respective publisher.

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Inspiration: 50+ Vector-Based Book Covers

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Vector artwork is everywhere these days, and book jackets are no exception. Often striking in their simplicity, vector graphics and illustration can stand out in a sea of photo-based covers on the bookshelf. As I looked through cover designs of the past few years, certain themes emerged.

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This version sticks a little closer to the original book however the effects are quite outdated now. For this poster I like again how the rabbit is at the front and Alice is behind, giving the impression of her chasing him. I really love the colours and art style, it looks like something from a story book.

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This is the poster for the Tim burton motion picture. As a child I remember loving this movie however now years later and given how much I enjoyed the book as a child, it was one of my least favourite adaptations. I’m not sure why the mad hatter was used  as a main focus when Alice is the main characters, however I do love the visuals and style of Wonderland

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Lewis Carroll, (born January 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England-died January 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey), English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the highest order.

Early life

Dodgson was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge, the wife of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. He was born in the old parsonage at Daresbury. His father was perpetual curate there from 1827 until 1843, when he became rector of Croft in Yorkshire-a post he held for the rest of his life (though later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of Ripon cathedral).

The Dodgson children, living as they did in an isolated country village, had few friends outside the family but, like many other families in similar circumstances, found little difficulty in entertaining themselves. Charles from the first showed a great aptitude for inventing games to amuse them. With the move to Croft when he was 12 came the beginning of the "Rectory Magazines," manuscript compilations to which all the family were supposed to contribute. In fact, Charles wrote nearly all of those that survive, beginning with Useful and Instructive Poetry (1845; published 1954) and following with The Rectory Magazine ( c. 1850, mostly unpublished), The Rectory Umbrella (1850-53), and Mischmasch (1853-62; published with The Rectory Umbrella in 1932).

Meanwhile, young Dodgson attended Richmond School, Yorkshire (1844-45), and then proceeded to Rugby School (1846-50). He disliked his four years at public school, principally because of his innate shyness, although he was also subjected to a certain amount of bullying; he also endured several illnesses, one of which left him deaf in one ear. After Rugby he spent a further year being tutored by his father, during which time he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford (May 23, 1850). He went into residence as an undergraduate there on January 24, 1851.

Oxford and the Liddells

Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies in 1852; on the strength of his performance in examinations, he was nominated to a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges). In 1854 he gained a first in mathematical Finals-coming out at the head of the class-and proceeded to a bachelor of arts degree in December of the same year. He was made a "Master of the House" and a senior student (called a fellow in other colleges) the following year and was appointed lecturer in mathematics (the equivalent of today's tutor), a post he resigned in 1881. He held his studentship until the end of his life.

As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the studentship at Christ Church was dependent upon his remaining unmarried, and, by the terms of this particular endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on December 22, 1861. Had he gone on to become a priest, he could have married and would then have been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt himself unsuited for parish work and, though he considered the possibility of marriage, decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor.

Dodgson's association with children grew naturally enough out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters. He also had a stammer-what he referred to as his "hesitation"-that he never wholly overcame; by some accounts, he was able to speak more naturally and easily to children, though his stammer varied in intensity by circumstance, and his contemporaries noted that it manifested itself with both adults and children. These factors may have contributed to Dodgson's beginning to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church. Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not, of course, the first of Dodgson's child friends. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and various other chance acquaintances. But the Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections-partly because they were the only children in Christ Church, since only heads of houses were free both to marry and to continue in residence.

Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed "Pricks"-"one of the thorny kind," and so the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass), the three little girls paid many visits to the young mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. As Alice remembered in 1932, they

used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along....He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.

Origins and publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank, and returned to Christ Church late in the evening: "On which occasion," wrote Dodgson in his diary, "I told them the fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I undertook to write out for Alice." Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the deanery, "Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me!" Dodgson himself recollected in 1887

how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.

Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on other occasions. He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive drawings and gave the finished product to Alice Liddell, with no thought of hearing of it again. But the novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting the deanery, chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it, and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. Dodgson, honestly surprised, consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of the period. Macdonald took it home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he "wished there were 60,000 volumes of it."

Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. He cut out the more particular references to the previous picnic (they may be found in the facsimile of the original manuscript, later published by him as Alice's Adventures Under Ground in 1886) and added some additional stories, told to the Liddells at other times, to make up a volume of the desired length. At Duckworth's suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel, the Punch magazine cartoonist, whom he commissioned to make illustrations to his specification. The book was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. (The first edition was withdrawn because of bad printing, and only about 21 copies survive-one of the rare books of the 19th century-and the reprint was ready for publication by Christmas of the same year, though dated 1866.)

The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it, based on further stories told to the Liddells. The result was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (dated 1872; actually published December 1871), a work as good as, or better than, its predecessor.

By the time of Dodgson's death, Alice (taking the two volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children's book in England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous in the world.

There is no answer to the mystery of Alice's success. Many explanations have been suggested, but, like the Mad Hatter's riddle ("The riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all"), they are no more than afterthoughts. The book is not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or message, either religious, political, or psychological, as some have tried to prove; and its only undertones are some touches of gentle satire-on education for the children's special benefit and on familiar university types, whom the Liddells may or may not have recognized.

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Lewis Carroll | Biography, Books, Poems, Real Name, Quotes, & Facts

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Lewis Carroll, English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the highest order.

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This is the 1951 motion picture poster for Disney's version of Alices Adventures in Wonderland. Though I'm not a big fan of the composition of the poster, I do love character design and attention to detail. The shadows and lighting are done so well and the rabbit's placement in the very front of the composition with Alice behind him is a really clever nod to how the story centres around Alice trying to follow the white rabbit. I also really love the gradient of the background with the lighter blue in the centre. Seeing this poster even now takes me back to when I used to watch this movie on repeat and I can't help but feel nostalgic and excited about watching it again.

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alice's adventures in wonderland free online study guide

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teaching alice's adventures in wonderland

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Themes | SparkNotes

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A summary of Themes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

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This cover is my favourite and I absolutely love it. The composition is busy but in a really beautiful way. I like the simple use of having a select amount of colours so the cover doesn't become overly messy. The blue, white and red work so well together so I know for a fact that this colour palette will be a good choice for any of my later designs. I love how everything is framed together and the things that make Alice in Wonderland such an iconic story are a part of the cover, it says a lot in a small amount of space. I don't know if I myself would do a cover with this much going on as I think a bitmap or vector cover would require a more stripped down design but I could definitely experiment in my thumbnails before coming to any decisions.

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Again this cover uses the classic illustrations from the original as a part of it. I quite like the choice of having said illustrations frame the title rather than being the point of focus. I like how the text is placed on a white ribbon of sorts that naturally moves your eye down. Again the cross hatching technique for shading is very pretty and works well with the rest of the illustrations.

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This book cover feels very old fashioned and wpuld be something I would expect to see in a collection of classic works. I don't like the use of the purple block behind the text as it cuts off a large portion of the illustration. I would have prefferd if the text could have been above or beyond Alice. I do really love the use of the cross hatching technique on the illustration itself. The colours look like they may have been adjusted or painted digitally so I really love the added use of the pen technique to make it look for analogue.

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I really love the colour palette of this book with the contrast of the red against the blue background, I think it looks really complimentary together. The illustrations of the Cheshire cat and Alice have a classic book illustration feel thats reminiscent of the original hand drawn pen illustrations with a splash of colour. One thing I love about the font is how the dots above the eye are replaced with a spades sign, a little nod to the use of cards throughout the story. I think this is a really cool touch but I think I would have chosen hearts instead of spades as the Queen of hearts has a large role in the story.