ABOUT

For the Penguin brief, I had redesign a book cover for one of three Penguin books: In Cold Blood, To Kill A Mocking Bird and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. The book I had chosen was To Kill A Mocking Bird as I was quite fond with the idea of designing a book jacket about racial differences and this quite literally complimented another project I was working on at that time, called Beyond Borders which in fact celebrated diversity. After doing some research on the book itself and watching the movie starring Gregory Peck - it certainly gave me more of an insight into the more deeper side of the story. I learned that it was not only about racial prejudice but a distorted view of justice. This was because the story focused on a black man who was accused of rape by a white woman. However, he was innocent yet because of the colour of his skin, he was charged guilty. Fascinatingly, the person defending the black man as a lawyer was a white man named Atticus Finch who was more than determined to bring his client to justice. Although, when the accused was charged guilty, he decided to run away and was described as a 'mad man' and therefore was shot by the police. More importantly, earlier on in the story, a 'mad dog' was shot by Atticus himself in order to protect his children even though he wasn't entirely sure that the dog was mad.This foreshadowed the death of the innocent black man who was also wrongly accused. Therefore, this explains my concept behind the distorted view of justice. Using this concept as my core idea, I decided to experiment with the form and shape of the scales of justice as this was a vital part of my perspective for the design of this book cover. I experimented with colour and typography by distorting the typeface to look slightly corrupt. Eventually, I decided to go ahead with a black and red themed cover which symbolises injustice and murder. Also, I used a silhouette of one of the main characters, Atticus Finch within the typeface. In addition, I experimented with the type to add more emphasis on the distorted aspect of the story.