Brief:
Design a book cover for one of the titles below. You need to choose one of the colour schemes and explain why you chose this scheme. For instance: ‘The Secret Garden’ by Frances Hodgson Burnett could be created using secondary colours to express naivety, honesty and harmony.
- ‘Lord of the flies’ by William Golding.
- ‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins.
- ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl.
The book cover must contain the title and the author’s name.
You must make use of colour to express the desired effects clearly.
This was an exciting task that I couldn’t wait to get started on, I wanted to dive in and get going right away. Luckily I opted against that and instead did the first L.T of the week, and by doing so learned some basics about colour theory and how to apply them. I also did some research on how to create book covers practically, and what should be our main focus in the process. With that in mind, I wrote down some questions that I needed to answer before even beginning my sketches.
-what do I want to achieve and how can I achieve that
-who is my target audience
-what is already out there for this book
-what type of book is this, and what type of author
-shall we also think about where it will be “sold”? online, bookshelf etc?
I chose Lord of the Flies, as this is one of the best books I have ever read, and it has a strong psychological undertone with a lot of moral dilemmas and fears. I felt there were many options to choose from design-wise and I would be in less “danger” of doing something close to what has been done before. I wanted to create a cover that arouse emotions in the viewer and prompted them to get curious and want to read the book. I made many different sketches, some simple with images, some drawn, some with effects. I landed on a dark theme and made a dark red colour pallet. The thought behind the design is that the red shows fear, anger and savagery, and also symbolizes the fire that is an ongoing topic in the book. The boys hunting a kid in a forest surrounded by flames and hatred. The typography is selected thinking it could have been written in stone, as they did not have a way of writing on the Island. The target group is young adults and adults.
