A Study on Visual Semantic Patterns Appeared in Cover Design of Growth Novels

Abstract

As Korea grew after liberation, social and cultural changes occurred and were reflected in the content and cover design of coming-of-age novels. In a situation where Korea's bildungsroman is also changing and developing, we found that research on cover design for this was very insufficient, and attempted to study the characteristic semantic system of the cover design of Korean bildungsroman by era. The research method targets the cover designs of 166 coming-of-age novels published from the 1970s to 2023. First, the meaning of keywords and titles by era of the content of the coming-of-age novels is analyzed, and second, the meaning of the cover design of the coming-of-age novels is visualized. Analyze it by dividing it into images, colors, and typography, and check the flow and patterns of change by era. Third, we analyzed the relationship between keywords and visual elements by era in the content of coming-of-age novels. Looking at the analysis results, firstly, the composition of the parts of speech in the title by era appeared to be diversifying and becoming more complex, from 1 type of ‘noun’ structure in the 1970s to 17 types of parts of speech in the 2020s. Second, in terms of images, the oil painting technique of illustrations was used the most, and as the 2000s progressed, the frequency of using the entire cover as an image increased, and the use of stripes also gradually expanded. In terms of color, in the 1970s the hue distribution was medium brightness and low saturation, in the 1990s it was a hue distribution of wide brightness and saturation with warm colors and neutral colors, and in the 2020s the hue distribution was again centered on neutral colors and cool colors with medium brightness and low saturation. appear. In terms of typography, horizontal writing, center alignment, single line, serif, asymmetrical layout, and color changes were used to emphasize headings. Third, the concreteness and abstractness of titles and images were analyzed. In the 1970s, abstract expressions were very high, and concrete expressions were used more in the 2000s. In terms of visualization of the title, the average matching rate was 63%, and it was analyzed that the specificity of the title affects image visualization. In general, keyword visualization was relatively high in the 1970s, but the matching rate gradually decreased thereafter.