Penguin Book Cover Revisited

In order to get my website and portfolio up to scratch and ready for submission, I had to go back to a few old projects. I actually really enjoyed this process, as it was a great opportunity to see and evaluate how i've improved over the last year or so.

One of my favourite projects from my first year at college was my Penguin Book Cover for Ken Kesey's novel, 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. My rationale behind my original design was to work with the themes of medication, control and rebellion. I represented this with a clean, structured graphic approach, reflective of Penguin’s book covers of the 1960’s, when the novel was written.

Upon going back to this work, I realised there were lots of areas for improvement. I felt I could improve the colours, going for brighter hues. The layout of the illustration, although at the time had real thinking behind it, wasn't particularly well executed. Instead of trying to improve that layout, I changed it completely, adding more pills and making it look like they'd been spilled onto a table. In terms of structuring the layout, I looked at some classic Penguin book cover sleeves from the era the novel was written, and I tried to recreate that with how I structured the copy. I feel I really managed to clean up the layout, and I think the overall cover now flows very well.