Design In Context

For my Design in Context Brief I’ve chosen to design a Book cover and since it’s a fictional book that was a trendsetter for noir styled crime I’ve been researching for a sense of place. The People, Places the pre-conceived notions all around the book are what I need to envision since I want to create a fresh looking and new design for the cover. So that means no looking at the movie adaption, posters or other covers it has.

I made myself a list of rules in response to some research on existing book covers and figured out what makes a book cover suitable in design and in comparison to other books, my design needs to conform to these simple rules:

1.)    To be eye catching! (good colours, maybe sensual imagery)

2.)    Avoid Portraiture if possible! (never just slap someone’s face on the cover)

3.)    Illustrate and reflect the themes of the Book. (Metaphor is the go to option, brownie points if it’s a scene or object from the book that has this)

4.)    Convey tone, feeling and atmosphere of the story or its genre

I even bought the Mammoth Book of Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett.  It contains a strip titled Secret Agent X written by Dashiel Hammet during the 1930’s, he can be seen as a pioneer of the hard-boiled detective meets femme fatale genre along with his contemporary, Raymond Chandler.

Another thing I’ve looked at it is the original Batman comics of 1939 and I noticed yesterday there was a CSI episode called Rashomama from series 6 I believe. That involves characters telling their version of the same crime story from a personal perspective akin to the Kurosawa’s Rashomon movie, one of the stories had a stylised sepia tone, almost black and white but the red from blood stains, wine and lipstick although dark stood out like a scene from Schindler’s list.