I decided to participate in the Penguin Design Award - my chosen brief being the Adult Non Fiction Award - the novel is 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' by Jeanette Winterson.
- This coming-of-age story is about a young girl brought up into a strict, almost cult-like catholic society only to discover that she falls for one of her female converts.It was requested that the cover reflect the many 'levels' of the story and so I wanted to incorporate that visually. Although this story is based around sexual orientation, it is my understanding that is mostly about bravery and self discovery, so I kept the cover as abstract as possible.
After discovering studio MinaLima's quirky and bright screenprint designs I wanted my design to show this same hand-made/ personal feel. I wanted readers to feel in touch with the book on a personal level - the story is very relatable for lots of readers, too.
For the design I was mainly influenced by the story of Adam and Eve not only because of it's relations to Catholicism, but also because of it's themes of breaking the norm and picking the 'forbidden fruit' - most traditionally depicted as an apple - hence oranges are NOT the only fruit!
I went for a very flat style - not only because this can be achieved well in adobe illustrator, but because it is 'trendy' and it was requested that the design appeals to a 'contemporary, enquiring and literary readership.' Here in this image I am tracing over a photograph in Illustrator of a sketch I did of a hand for picking the apple.
A very flat screenprint-like style was adopted for the oranges adorning the cover.
I chose the typeface 'Krona One' from google web fonts because not only was it free for use, but it had the same vintage-contemporary feel to match the illustrations. I had a very vivid idea of how I wanted it to look and moved in straight-away with the right aligned type. I wasn't worried about the fact that 'Oranges' was split over two lines, as this only contributed to the contemporary feel.
The request from the brief for lots of 'layers' to the design invited a gradient background in my eyes. I enjoy competition briefs such as this as it gives me a chance to do something I want personally - although answering to the brief, the briefs are usually quite open to interpretation.
I started to draw the apple here - I didn't start with any pre-computer sketch for this as I wanted the rogue curves of the pen tool dictate a more obscure shape for the apple.
I wanted the apple to stand out the most so I made it the most detailed.
However, when I put it into the design so far it was already far too busy. This is also the reason I didn't include the serpents head, just it's body - as there were far too many focal points.
So I made the apple white. So now here you can see that there are lots of things going on!
At this point I hadn't even considered where the front and back cover text were to be, so I have to confess it was on-screen trial and error!
I imported the whole design into photoshop and gave the design lots of treatment with brushes and textures to create a more 'hand made' feel.
Here I am still playing around with the given text for the back and front covers.
Here is the final design. In the end I went for a more subtle approach with the serpent by making it thicker and therefore a better backdrop for the bright oranges, white text and features. I chose a simple sans serif font to compliment the 'Krona One' font featured for the title. All in all I really loved this quick-turnaround project which I got to treat as more of an illustration piece and get to try out some new techniques (screenprint style brushes in photoshop).
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