Studio Brief 01 - Responsive - TKAM - Further Research

In my initial research into the competition and the books helped me decided that To Kill a Mockingbird the book that I wanted to illustrate. This is for a number of reasons firstly I have a good understanding of the book already and I feel that this would help me to figure out a more interact response, two is that there are so many themes and different contexts that can be used to create a good response. 

Design in 1930's America - 

These are some posters that I found that helped me understand the style of design back in the 30s of America and you can clearly see that there are many aspects that make it what it is. for example the large and interesting typography catches the eye well. The colour plate is also very complimentary of the design, helping it to stand out. Illustration also seems like a big part of design then as this was most likely the best way to show imagery as camera quality would have be poor. 

Mockingbirds - 

The plot is very literally linked to the mockingbird theme, it suggests that the mockingbird is an innocent creature and killing one would destroy that innocence. This could make for an interesting cover, I could symbolise this by showing how characters in the book are destroyed of their innocence by learning about the tragic happenings of keys parts of the book.

What makes a bestselling fiction - 

The of the considerations of this brief to make sure that the cover designed could potentially be sold. So I am looking into what makes a best seller, by analysing the covers I hope it will help me understand the best ways of creating a bestseller cover. 

The main theme that all these books all cover is that they aren't trying to reveal anything to the reader obviously, they all drop subtle hints on maybe one overarching theme within the book. For example - Columbine, a non-fiction book at follows the story of the school shooting in America in 2009. But what the cover is has done is reveal almost nothing to the reader, you either have to have read the book to understand or have previous knowledge on the subject. I believe this is a great way of selling covers as it creates a slight mystery. 

As well as the other novels that I have looked into that have very interesting covers I am also looking into what makes a book Penguin cover winners from previous years as this may help when I get to the design stage because then I will be able to try and design a cover that has Penguin in mind which will also give me a better chance of getting accepted.

Below are two of my favourites from 2016, they are both representing the book in a interesting way and they are't revealing a lot of information but at the same time they are beautiful to look at and they make you want to pick up the book and read it, which is exactly what you would want with a winning submission.