Student Design Award 2018 - 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell
This is my entry for the Student Design Awards 2018. I chose to create a book cover for Animal Farm by George Orwell. Unfortunately I wasn't shortlisted for the finals of the competition but I really enjoyed the experience of making a book cover.
Project development
Brief: We are looking for a cover design which will reflect the book’s status as one of the great modern political allegories of our time, as relevant today as it was when it was first published over 50 years ago. It is rich with ideas, characters, allegory, political and moral philosophy – read it and decide for yourself how best to showcase the content of this remarkable novel through your cover design and bring it to a new generation of readers.
For my design I was really inspired by existing book covers of Animal Farm already out there. I also loved the fact it was based on the Russian Revolution so really wanted to incorporate that aspect. All of the covers I had looked at had similar features, they all used red and black colour schemes, had pictures of the main characters (pigs) and were sort of gloomy. I wanted to incorporate this into my design as I wanted to stay traditional to the book. These are the images that inspired my work the most from my research:
After looking at these images for my research I decided to stick to a similar theme and draw three pigs for the main characters, the concept I had in mind was that it would be the evolution of how the pigs started to develop into humans, first of all by walking on their two hind legs.
After this I started to put together some book covers, heavily inspired from Russian Constructivist art. These are not my best designs and but I thought I would put them in to show the development of my work.
I scrapped this layout completely and designed something new, although I did keep the back page rather similar. I was really inspired by the Russian constructivist font and layout. I wanted to add more angles into my design and also be more focused on the text as I really didn't like how unstructured my previous designs were.
These four pieces show the development of my design. I strongly focus on angles and also text. The font I used for the title is Russian downloaded from dafont. I like the outcome of these as they connect well from the back to the front cover and have a good sense of style throughout. This leads me on to my final design which I have entered into the competition.