Design for Print: Front cover development

I attempted to create something from my type I made but I wasn't that keen on it. It looked a bit naff and it was too similar to things I had done before and I don't want to take my print pack down that root so I decided after a few attempts not to really take it much further and work soley with type, I know my hand writing would give it a more personal touch but i don't think that would be appropriate for something that would be used as a reference guide.

Even with type, it doesn't really work well.

My tests and for the type, although I like the colour development in these screenshots, I despise the type it looks really unprofessional.

Now just type in the same format I really like, I used Edmondsans here I found it from the Lost Type foundry. It seems fitting and appropriate for a neutral audience, male or female wanting to learn about print. I like the mix of orange and blue in these as well as the white overlay ones. They're the ones that stand out the most and probably would be the easiest ones to print.

Out of the lot, I really liked these two, mostly the blue one. For the magenta colour I've been thinking to print it with neon pink to make it stand out from the navy blue thats used as the fill. The white background one is all nice but I'm unsure to how it would look, I think the pink would stand out too much and be too feminine.

The idea of the crop marks was for it to work as an interaction between the packaging it would come in, displayed below. I wanted it to look like it's be something made ready for print to establish the link for something who would happen to pick up the book in store. Although Im unsure if they'd understand the packagings concept.

How it'd look inside the packaging mockup.

I printed it out to the size I wanted, which is roughly around the size of A5 just a bit smaller I'd be able to crop pages down from a4 when it comes to creating the book.

EDIT: 23/11/13

I went to look down in Vernon to what inks they had so I could prepare my document ready for printing.

I made this little sample selection of all the different florescence they had available, I found a blue that would be perfect matching the colour in the illustrator document screen-shots above.

Of them however, I loved the green and the red fluorescence, I don't want to go with the green however, I just really liked the colour of it on the page. The red however I really like because it's a rather orange shade of red it's not something I've seen to often and I'd like to go with that. 

To take advantage of the red, I'd like to use something more complimentary like a light gray to attempt to make it stand out a bit more rather then the blue. I just have a feeling the blue and pink would way to feminine. 

I went to vernon to screen print this, I discovered that they do a metallic silver and I thought It'd take the chance to use that instead of mixing up my own shade of grey because it'd be easier for me. However I was gender neutral and it looked really nice. So why not. 

It has a really nice shimmer to it too.

Now, the problem I had with the fluorescence is that it takes  A LOT of acrylic in the mix to make it vivid. So you have to do multiple passes through with the screen when it's got more binder. The problem with putting more acrylic in is that it dries a lot faster. Meaning it blocks up the screen.

For example below was 4 passes through:

1 pass through:

3 passes through:

The problem is with this is that the more you go through, the more room for error due to it slipping on the bed. PROBLEMATIC.

EDIT: 27/12/13

I went to go screen print again, I decided to try and this time just doing one single colour for the cover to simplify the process. I choose to do it simply as the flourcesent red because I really liked how it looked on the newsprint on the previous test. 

I had a lot of fluorescent in the mix, but the thing with it is. It came out rather Pink although it's not so evident in the photo below. It's not the look I'm really wanting to go for. I think the best course of action right now would be for me to print it in black and instead make elements of the book in fluorescent simply so I eliminate any possibility of the colours looking to masculine or feminine.

However, if I were to take this course of action I think as a replacement colour I'm going to go with the Orange flourcesent, It's a really nice shade of orange and I'm not sure why I didn't pick on it later and avoiding all this time wasted screen printing each cover.

EDIT: 13/12/13

I have to admit, I'm glad I did say black, why didn't I do black before!?! I should have experimented more with colours initially. I think I was scared of it looking too boring but combined with the spine it looked fantastic instead of being overloaded with colour on the front. It's plain but it does the job it needs to do.