Following on from the discussion of George Orwell’s novel 1984, look at the covers for Margaret Atwood’s equally dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), in which a woman finds herself surviving inside a harsh American fundamentalist society, that sees women’s roles as subservient cooks, matrons, and mothers. Alternatively, you can pick a different book to respond to, but it needs to be one with more than one cover design, so avoid recently published books.
Are there key conceptual motifs being used over and over again within different cover treatments? Can you identify more expressive versions of the covers? Check the date of each version and try to speculate about the historical, political or social context for each one. (Don’t spend long on this but it’s important to realise that creative design doesn’t happen in a vacuum.)
Using one of the main motifs you have identified (such as the uniforms that feature the book), the title of the book, author’s name, and no more than three colours (including black and white) generate as many different layouts of the cover design as you can. Think about how you can dynamically layer, organise, frame, clash, or balance these elements. Work quickly and come up with lots of different visual possibilities.
This is a similar exercise to the Lightbulb Project in Graphic Design 1, which aims to generate quick design possibilities by arranging your typography, motif and colours in as many, and as varied, ways as possible. Examples of students’ responses can be seen here: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/opencollegearts/the-light-bulb-project/
Use thumbnail drawings or DTP layouts to achieve at least ten fundamentally different layouts. This is a warm-up exercise that will help you with your approach to designing a cover for assignment two.
I have chosen to look at cover designs for Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange for this exercise. This is not an exhaustive collection of covers but rather some of the most prominent designs.
The key image in this design by David Pelham is the eye with makeup. At the time he was art director at Penguin and also designed this cover himself. His approach to the fiction covers had a lot of freedom and each design responded differently to each title. After the idealism of the sixties there was a come down in the seventies and designs in the seventies often seem transitional – they feature bold colours but also thick lines and a more restrained quality.
This book is part of the Twentieth Century Classics series by Penguin. It has a sombre look with a frame around the author and title. The only other features are the publisher logo and a full cover photograph. Around this time Penguin was re-inventing its brand and possibly more comfortable with a minimal design such as this. At this point in history Britain was in the grips of ‘Cool Britannia’ so this design being quite sombre doesn’t reflect that. The image is quite conceptual with ‘clockwork’ opening a person’s eye to mimic a scene in the book/film. The eye in various forms is a definite motif with A Clockwork Orange.
This is the only example of a non-Penguin book in this collection. It was released on October 24th 2001 and it remains unclear whether the design was created post September 11th – it is a very dark cover regardless. It is also a very expressive cover that doesn’t use any motifs and instead seems to encapsulate anger on its front cover.
This design is another outlier as far as motifs are concerned but it is another example of a Penguin book. This is part of the Penguin Decades series which chooses books that define certain decades (this one being the sixties). This design was devised by Penguin art director John Hamilton and features the art of Allen Jones (who’s art features in the film). What is certainly true of this design is that it seeks to express sixties vibes and become nostalgic.
At Penguin, Jamie Keenan redesigned the Modern Classics range of books with a very restrained style. It features a photograph of milk (another important motif) by photographer Veronique Rolland. This isn’t the original 2000 design but a redesign from the late noughties. The original design features a banner at the bottom and small serif type. This version has been altered so that the text is now sans serif, bigger, bolder and without a banner. It is a more minimalistic design and I wonder whether it is a response to the 2008 Financial Crisis and the austerity that ensued.
Jonathan Barnbrook created this ultra minimal design. It is conceptual as the orange acts as the final word in the title. The text is small and sits in each corner and space dominates the design. Barnbrook’s design is reactive against the 1972 David Pelham cover and is reductive. The orange is clearly a strong motif.
This is another design by Jamie Keenan. This is one of a series of books that was created as a collaboration between Barbican and Penguin Classics. This is why Jamie Keenan tributes the utopian visions of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon Architects. It features the Barbican Martini Bar as the Korova Milk Bar. The cover is very expressive but also manages to use the motif of milk.
My layouts
I have worked with the motif of a glass of milk in my experimentations.
This I feel is the strongest of my layout attempts. Alternate strips of colour at the top with varying text colour really makes the title standout. I used a solid, strong sans serif typeface (Futura) for the title and author. The title is bigger and bolder than the author because I felt it should sit higher in the hierarchy. It is also ranged left which works better. A white strip sits at the bottom to balance the image and the milk is layered behind it to add more dynamics. The position and size of the milk seemed like the right choice to balance the image. I used a black line stroke for the milk in most versions but the change to white really worked better in my view and blended the milk with the bottom strip.
On reflection I thought that these layouts reminded me of the album cover art for Muse’s Origin of Symmetry by William Eager. It wasn’t a conscious influence but I see the similarities in colours, simple line drawings and sans serif typeface.
My other layouts had a variety of sizes and positions to create a variety of results:
This was a fun exercise. I had done the lightbulb exercise previously but this exercise provided more freedom and a bigger sense of important. It reminds me of the myriad outcomes that a designer can get with just a few components to work with.
References
Baines, P., 2005. Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005. 1st ed. London: Penguin Books.
Creative Boom. 2017. Jamie Keenan’s Barbican-inspired book covers for Science Fiction Penguin Classics. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/jamie-keenans-barbican-inspired-book-covers-for-science-fiction-penguin-classics/. [Accessed 5 June 2020].
Creative Review. 2013. Barnbrook’s A Clockwork Orange cover. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/barnbrooks-a-clockwork-orange-cover/. [Accessed 5 June 2020].
Daniel's OCA Blog: Book Design 1 