Mindscape In Cyberspace

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more than mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

Digital Illustration
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This is another illustration type I have drawn for the anti-human trafficking project for UNIFEM/Equations. At the visualization stage I tried to come up with a various illustration forms with different emotional quotients. The illustration I have shown in one of my previous post was less emotional and more associated with logical deduction of actual activities and its physical references. Unlike the previous one, the illustration shown above in this post is more attached with emotional suggestions. The key phrases for this illustration were, Compassion, Sympathy and Humanity. Where as for the previous one, the key words I had in my mind while designing, are Plan, Development, Result and Hope. Below is a thumbnail image for the previous illustration, I mentioned.

Previous illustration:

Story Illustration for daily newspaper (1989)
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This illustration is from my old paper-made folder of story illustrations from the my ‘teen’ days that I have done for news paper, during 89-90! I started working as an illustrator and commercial artist while I was still in my college, pursuing my graduation in Literature.

This particular illustration is one of my favorites from that era. I still remember very clearly that how I used the nozzle of a watercolor tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any pen, pencil or brushwork and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen. The thick, long lines drawn by nozzle  and the finer and shorter lines by felt pen, when juxtaposed with each other, broght out the field of depht, quite successfully, irrespective of the limitation of space, tones, and colors.

When a group of scholars and academics involved with a publishing initiative that seeks to bring out significant works on political theory, approached me to design covers for their upcoming publications, I was genuinely very excited. Their approach demonstrated a disregard for the cover and visual identity of the publications. Portraits of writers independently done by recognized illustrators were used, with a conventional serious color scheme of gray-blue, irrespective of the subject of that particular publication. They needed covers for two of their next publications emphasizing the content.

The Paradox of Freedom
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For the first book, “The Paradox of Freedom” my challenge was, how do I express the idea of “paradox” in the context of India’s freedom from British rule, and its emergence as a nation? How do I assemble these ideas with the writer’s strong Marxist viewpoint? I decided to use solid bold text to form a puzzle-like complex structure with flipped and interlinked letters, randomly filled in with the familiar saffron, green and white of the Indian flag. Approximating the look and texture to that of the Soviet propaganda posters, I used the communist red for the background to suggest a Marxist reading. The result was quite effective.

Revolution by Consent
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Designing acover for the second book - “Revolution by Consent” was more challenging for me. How to communicate an abstract idea like ‘consent of the people’? How to represent revolution graphically? I started working with the idea of the mass and abstracted it through a set of hands raised as if in protest signifying a revolution. A closer look at the gesture of the hands in silhouette demonstrates that instead of protest, the hands represent consent or agreement to a cause. The cause is the backdrop - the first few words of the Preamble to the Indian constitution. The red color seeping into the Preamble represents the Marxist framework used to read these historical events.