The Penguin Random House Student Design Award 2017 seemed like a great opportunity for me to have a small break from just internal university briefs, and test my hand at following a brief where certain corporate limitations come into play, while still keeping the aspect of design and creativity.
Out of the three titles, I decided to go for the Adult Non-Fiction title: True Crime, non-fiction novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The reason why this stood out to me was not just the chilling and real context of the storyline depicted in his writing, but Capote’s transition from novelist to journalism was something he had not done before, and incorporated in this piece of writing. Capote’s fascination with the murders that occurred in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 became an obsession for him.
To start off my research into the project, I looked at the previous winners of the Penguin Design Award, which included ‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran, designed by Zachary Wieland in 2016, and ‘Freakonomics’ by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, designed by Scott Kooken in 2015, shown below. The designs are elegant, coherent and display a charming attraction behind ‘judging a book by it’s cover’, in this case it’s design.
Often it is the design of the sleeve that pulls a person in to pick up the book from the shelf, at least in my case; I am a sucker for good packaging.
The next piece of research I went on towards was to look at all the other book covers that had been designed by artists etc for In Cold Blood. As it is a contemporary piece of literature, I can see how the sleeves reflected that image. There were a lot of great designs that had me both impressed and envious, as one may normally wish that they had thought of that first. See below some of the incredible designs made by people.
In addition to that, I also looked online at other sleeve designs I found interesting on the internet. Mixed with type and imagery and linking to a strong but limited colour palette, there were a lot of good ideas that I felt portrayed the idea and theme of the book really well, while attempting to keep it as contemporary as possible.
I wanted to continue looking at these images and having read the book that I wanted to show a similar yet original take on what I felt was necessary to show in the theme of the competition, while trying to get as creative as I could within the boundaries of the brief.
The Illustrative Mind 