Second Non Fiction Blog

My book is “The Meaning of Human Existence” by Edward O. Wilson, and I decided to redesign the cover of the book. As seen in the picture above, the cover for the original book is quite simple, and I thought that I could incorporate some of the author’s important points into the cover. The original book cover has the title of the book, and in the background, there is just a foggy forest. And there is a little oval in between the title and the author and it also shows the same foggy forest. I don’t really know what this has to do with the book, because he does not directly address forests or fogginess in his book, and this does not seem to relate with some of the main points in his book. This is why I decided to redesign the cover, and to try and have the cover indicate a little bit what the book is about.

First I have the main part of the cover inside a white circle with black all around it. I wanted this to be like looking at Earth and at human existence through a microscope. In this book, the author makes the point that the Earth is very insignificant and small in the Universe when he says, “Earth relates to the universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, N.J., for a few hours this afternoon.” I also used the microscope to show another one of the author’s points, which is that humans are barely aware of our surroundings because we only see a sliver of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a fraction of sounds around us. So I wanted to show that humans need a microscope or some other technology to see many of the things going on around us.

I then had the title of the book over a picture of the earth, because another one of Edward O. Wilson’s points is that the Earth is our only home, and he that destroying the Earth for natural resources is, “an attack on ourselves.” He stresses that human existence is dependent on the Earth, so I put this write on top of the Earth, to show that if there is no Earth, there are no humans either.

Probably the biggest point in the book is that we should have the humanities and science work together for the human race to be more successful. In the final sentence of his book, Edward O. Wilson writes, “If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.” (Wilson 187). I wanted to show that right now, humanities and science they are separated from each other in school and jobs and colleges. But they both make up half a brain, so if they joined together, they would make a full brain, and humans would be much better off and we would be able to achieve a greater meaning of human existence.

For the font, I selected the Philosopher font because I thought that this book was kind of a like a philosophy book, and I also thought that the font fit with the book and the author pretty well.