OUGD406 - Final Ideas for Crit

For the interim crit we need at least 4 different ideas. The Illusion one was okay, but I decided to create another using wavy lines rather than circles, and also keeping most of the text legible:

I think I prefer this design as it's neater and more subtle than the other, and it doesn't look like an obvious illusion.
As my only designs so far had been based on illusions, I decided to try something different. I experimented with shapes and putting text around them to make it quite hard to read, but not impossible. I wanted the viewer to have to think about what they were looking at, so I came up with this:

The circular shape with the bold text inside represents an eye/telescope/magnifying glass, to signify looking closer. I think this cover would be suitable for this book as it's a text heavy book, but the cover is light and approachable but not misconceiving. 

My next idea was based around illegibility. I've recently been using a 3D red/blue approach to my work, which I really like - overlaying the colours to make a new colour in the middle can make it look quite disorientating if done correctly. Firstly I typed out the text and made it cyan, copied this text and offset it slightly and changed it to red, then applied the darken blending mode. I used the liquify tool to make the type quite illegible but also interesting to look at:

This is one of my favourite covers so far, because the colours and the way they over lay each other. I like the concept of the illegibility and how it fits together with the title. 

Finally, my last idea to take into the crit focused around the question mark sign, as a lot of the essays in this book question design and push the boundaries. I tried to combine it with the illusion designs slightly, to make it more interesting and came up with this: 

I'm not sure if I'm 100% on this design, I have others that I prefer, but it's always useful to get other peoples opinions from the crit so I'll see what they think.