Drawing the Detectives - Study Task 03 - OUDG403

Drawing the Detectives // Agatha Christie 125th Birthday 

The Brief

Using your developing understanding of colour theory and typographic design/usage produce a graphic reinterpretation of your given Agatha Christie novel as part of the Guardians celebration of what would have been the authors 125th birthday. 

We were each given on of her novels at random, from choosing them from a hat. This made it easier because you didn't know what you were going to get and made it more interesting.
the novel I picked out was 'The Clocks' part of the Hercule Poirot series, the book itself was about a murder that has very strange happenings. When I looked the book I wanted to base the cover of a key part of the story, in this case that was the 4 clocks thats stopped at 4.13 and that were put around the victims body. Once I had looked into the book and read a summary of it I deiced that I should look thought covers of the book to see the style and hoe they had been displayed in the past. 

After looking at the previous book covers, I could clearly see that bold type was the way forward for thus project, as it needed to stand out on shelves from other books. But I think what these covers lacked was being simple and I wanted to bring the cover into the 21st century so that the book could then appeal to a bigger audience.

When I started to design my first idea I looked at many different clock faces that I could use for the cover, and this when I cam across the venn digram style clock face. Im not sure why this grabbed by attention but I found the idea of the venn diagram interesting. So I had a go at creating a cover using the venn digram, below is the result of this first idea.

The idea behind this cover was to show the 4.13 but in an abstract way so that it wasn't that obvious at the first glance to see what the cover was trying to represent. So to put the clock into context, the yellow hand is the hour hand, the blue is the minuet hand and the red shows the second. It may not be east to first see but I feel that it would intrigue passers by, this is also why I chose the bright primary colours against the matte grey as it would stand out as well as being clean and simple. With the type again I wanted to keep the simple look going, so I choose Pier Sans as the typeface because I feel that it is a clean sans serif typeface suitable for the job of a title. 

Keeping with a similar style but this time making the concept more simple so that viewers would be able to see what it was saying better. I idea behind the digital clock type was so that it gave the book a more contemporary feel specially as the book was written in the 1960's. The colour theory is very simple, I just wanted too keep it with the cool matte grey to show the feeling of death and cold feelings that happen at these times. The simple block two tone colours as well I feel work well together because they are different tones so they compliment each other rather than making too much happen.