To Kill A Mockingbird is a prize-winning masterpiece of modern literature and was voted the most loved book of the last sixty years by The Times readers in October 2009. It has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold over thirty million copies worldwide. The trick here will be to come at it from a fresh perspective and to avoid repeating the obvious iconography from the many previous editions in print. The cover should feel timeless and confident, and appeal to a whole new generation of readers. Penguin are looking for a striking cover design that is well executed, has an imaginative concept and clearly places the book for its market. While all elements of the jacket need to work together as a cohesive whole, the front cover must be effective on its own and be eye-catching within a crowded bookshop setting. It also needs to be able to work on screen for digital retailers such as Amazon.
The winning design will need to:
- Have an imaginative concept and original interpretation of the brief
- Be competently executed with strong use of typography
- Appeal to a contemporary readership
- Show a good understanding of the marketplace
- Have a point of difference from the many other book covers it is competing against
One important part of this brief is to know exactly what the judges are looking for, also knowing what they specialise in may help my entry as their practice or interests could inform my entry. The Penguin judges include:
Suzanne Dean – Art Director
Suzanne studied Graphic Design and in her first job she was designing food packaging and brochures. and a year later she started publishing. She joined Penguin Books as a Senior Designer, working for Hamish Hamilton. Five years later she joined Random House as Art Director for Vintage Books, whose many imprints include Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus and Harvill Secker. Here she established the design for the Vintage Classics list. Her covers include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Sense of an Ending, Atonement and Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Below is an image of her work for The curious incident of the dog in the Night-time, her style is illustrative and playful with the use of bold colours and type, two versions of hand rendered type are used in the titling of the book which indicates a lot about her style. I found an article about what she thinks is a good book cover design on The Telegraph, 'To judge a book by its cover is so unwise that it has long been a metaphor for other forms of misinterpretation. But only a naive author would suppose that the cover of his or her book was irrelevant. It’s the first thing we see, and there’s no way to make it entirely objective: a book’s cover offers an interpretation of its contents – some inflection, if only by its typeface or colour. And yet its effect on the reader is mostly subliminal. Book designers are the ultimate hidden persuaders.'
She feels very strongly that e-books offer designers of physical books the opportunity to be more creative. “I absolutely think we should seize the initiative and make the best books we can,” she told me in her office earlier this week. “I can’t imagine a world that didn’t have books on shelves – it would be like having no paintings on walls or photographs in frames. All of these things are part of what makes you who you are.”
Dean often spends weeks during a design process gliding into abstraction, she once first asked a letterpress printer to blur wet ink, then realising she’d have to paint the letters herself. She printed out A3 sheets with the title and author in the faintest possible type, then went to work with a brush and Quink ink, which she felt the schoolboys in the book would have used. Her process isn't perfect as she says herself but she goes back to basics and isn't afraid to use traditional methods to get the answers to a brief.
Richard Ogle – Art Director
Richard graduated with a Graphic Design degree and the intention of working in corporate graphics and packaging but was fortuitously drawn into publishing through design agency The Senate.
Over the years he has worked on a range of cover designs for books in all genres, ranging from novels by John Grisham, James Herbert, James Patterson, Karin Slaughter, Wilbur Smith, P.G. Wodehouse, Lisa Jewell, Jilly Cooper and Douglas Coupland, to autobiographies by Peter Kay, Tony Blair, David Jason, Rod Stewart, Steve Coogan and John Cleese.
A supportive part of research again proved to be searching the judges online and trying to find any articles on them. I found one Creative Interviews article about Ogle, and the most useful part was him talking about his process for redesigning covers. 'Redesigning existing titles are an important part of your role as Art Director. Talk us through the process of breathing new life into these jackets, what is your unique approach? It’s hard to say as each redesign has it’s own challenges and requirements but, as a designer, the main thing we can offer is our interpretation of a book, so I think it’s very important to read the books to be able to distill your own vision rather than simply taking briefs at face value and supplying exactly what is asked for or expected.'
Jason Smith – Art Director
After graduating from the University of Derby with a BA Honours in Graphic Design, Jason moved to London to further his education at Central Saint Martins. He began his career working for a company which specialized in packaging for CDs and DVDs, combining his passion for music and film with design. The move into publishing was a natural progression and he secured a job at Random House as designer, quickly followed by a more senior role. He has recently been made Art Director of Cornerstone, working on a list of successful authors including James Patterson, Helen Dunmore, Tony Parsons, Hugh Howey and Katie Price to name a few.
Classic covers of To kill a Mockingbird
All though in the brief it specifies not to replicate previous covers by using the same iconography and symbols, I'm oblivious to what the covers look like so I feel some visual research into previous covers would help. Birds, trees and a child swinging on a swing are the most common symbols in use, so I'd like to stay away from these if possible. Further research into the book will help me find new and alternative symbols which the judges are looking for.
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