A few years ago Penguin Books released a live brief to redesign the cover of Roald Dahl's famous book 'James and the Giant Peach'. My teacher participated whilst at university and found the experience was a great precursor to what it would be like to work in a real job. He decided to give us the same brief to work on over the span of around a month, so that we would be introduced to deadlines early on in our A-Level education. In the assignment we were tasked with recreating the book cover, taking into consideration the plot of the book, without revealing too much of the story in our design. We had to make sure we included the book title, authors name, and Penguin logo on the front cover - and include a bar code and blurb on the back. This has been one of my favourite projects to complete. I enjoyed looking into the world of kids literature and figuring out how to make an attractive and eye-catching book cover for both children and their parents.
The first stage of my process was to create multiple scamps, keeping an open mind to include as many different scenarios to represent the plot of the book and pivotal scenes. Once these had been created, I chose the images that stood out the most and used them to create a design with more detail, sketching out the individual parts of the cover and fine tuning them so that they could be used later.
Once happy with the design, I moved onto choosing the colours. The cover needed to look realistic, but also eye-catching and hold the joy of childhood. With this in mind, I used bright colours to help the book stand out but still be appealing to adult eyes. I mapped out where these pops of colour would go to make sure the balance of the page was right. When I was happy with the design and colour scheme it was time to move on to the final stage of pulling all my ideas together.
The final stage was to finesse the separate sections and bring them together into a complete book sleeve. I took my sketches and coloured them in with alcohol markers. Once completed, I scanned them and used InDesign to put the various pieces together, adding the different requirements to the front and back. I am really happy with how this came out, and thoroughly enjoyed the whole process.