Books' Visual- HaTorah
An intercultural exploration design journey that convey the mysterious stories.
Intertwined with book layout, cover design, and 28+8 pics of full-color/ monochrome illustrations that convey the author’s special story meanings.
I-Ching Came from HoTorah #2- Trograms
Role
Responsible for cover, layout design, illustrations…all visual aspects.
Author | Ding Da-gang
Editor | Wu Shu-min
Collaboration
Based on the stories and expectations shared by the author, I created concept drafts and discussed with him, following I draw the complete illustration, then discussions and revisions continued until final confirmation.
Illustration style
The author wanted to change the printing method of the second episode to monochrome, so I focused on creating illustrations with clear and tense lines and gray scales.
Book cover
The author want to use Trigrams as the cover theme, and combine 8 illustrations with the hexagrams, so the image frame is presented in the form of hexagrams, and is specially decorated with Pantone color highlights the core of the illustration.
Iterations of cover design.
Redrawing Oracle Bone scripts (甲骨文) to assist readers understanding the evolution of ancient characters visually.
one main parts of the discussion in this book is based on metaphors of oracle bone scripts. I redrawn the evolved of ancient characters in order to present images that cannot be conveyed by words.
I-Ching Came from HoTorah #1- Hebrew Stories in Ancient Egypt
Illustration style
Draw 28 illustrations for the 4 hexagrams stories. The color theme and the main tones of the illustrations refer to and match the representative elements of the four hexagrams: fire, water, wind, and earth.
Book cover
The cover represents the exchange and integration of Chinese and Western cultures. The minimal lines represent the parchment scrolls of the ancient Bible and the bamboo slips representing I-Ching.
Learning
How to simplify and extract the core of the rich stories that the author expressed, so as to create illustrations that are consistent with the author's ideas while providing space for readers' imagination is a great challenge.
The idea and intention is the soul of the image, followed by the technique. It is necessary to discuss the concepts with the author earlier, instead of drawing sketches and limited by the expression methods unconsciously.