Judge a book by its cover. Generative approach.

This project is an example of generative art and design application in publication graphic design. It shows how programming may be applied in a book covers generation. The work combines such fields of Computer Science as Natural Language Pro-cessing (processing text data to get its structure and features), Algorithms and Data Structures (representing and working with a tree data structure), and Data Visualization (generation of cover elements). All covers are generated for Artemis Fowl – a series of novels by Eoin Colfer. We propose three approaches to create elements for book covers: from more data-driven and less generative to more generative and less data-driven.

The idea was inspired by Stefanie Posavec’s talk about what ‘handmade’ means in regards to data visualization and how data illustrators usually perform complicateddata processing without writing a simple line of code.

Approach 1

The first approach shows how two characteristics extracted from a book – its structure and a text polarity score – are used to create a book cover in a data-driven way. Two main elements are a graph generated with a radial tree approach and a background gradient image.

Approach 2

A data-driven approach with noise added to show the book data. A book structure is displayed in a spiral plot with book chapters as main visual components and paragraphs along with their sentences as the data that creates visual noise in a graph.

Approach 3

a generative approach to the book cover creation process. As a basis for generation, we chose a Peter de Jong attractor. Such text features as average word length, average sentence length, and the average number of sentences in a paragraph are used as the attractor parameters.

Prerequisites

To install all the required packages run the following command:

pip install requirements.txt

Conclusion

All book covers are available in Artemis Fowl book covers.

To sum up, using generative art to create publications design broaden possibilities of what can be illustrated. Moreover, it gives more flexibility and adjustability to creating visual based on distinctive inputs.