ABOUT

A University project - To create a book cover for the Penguin Design Awards.

I chose 'In Cold Blood' as my own reading interests lie within crime, suspense and horror.

Most of the covers already created for this book seemed to take similar elements from the story, the ones you may immediately expect. I saw a lot of nooses, blood, bullets, maps etc and felt that I wanted to push my design to be different and more intriguing.

With this in mind, I took the 'yellow bird' from one of the murderers dreams as I felt this would be an interesting symbol to experiment with. It also offers a bit more mystery! I used this image combined with inked fingerprints to create the feathers. The fingerprint element brought in crime profiling with out being too immediately obvious, and created the bird silhouette which created mystery, rather than giving the story away on the first visual impression.

To further the project, I created some posters I felt would work well to promote the book. To continue the suspense and mystery theme, I felt a series of posters would work well. The first would begin with a black poster with a single finger print and no additional information. Initially this would create some intrigue, but people wouldn't give it much additional though. The second poster, more fingerprints would pop up. Then the final poster would be placed with all of the information on. These posters would be displayed in a subway where regular commuters would pass it daily.