Research
Penguin Book covers have been illustrated for a long time and when looking into The Big Sleep and reading it I felt that the cover needed some modernising and not just by articulating the old fashioned story but putting a creative and modern twist on a vintage murder novel.
From looking at numerous book covers of The Big Sleep many have took a literal approach and designed something with that in mind. The brief states the target market is any reader of any age and that it needs to stand out from a book shelf.
Book Cover Design
When Thinking about the word modern, Photography comes into mind, everyone takes photos and our lives are lived through them so I wanted to take this and take a photographic approach for the front cover.
What I was going to photograph was hard and after reading the book I wrote words and feelings and phrases down and after much thought I decided that there were many different levels of the story. There were upper class, Numberous killings, Poison, and a very deep storyline so to capture all this in an image had to be creative.
Image Representation
In the image I have chosen to photograph, there are many different pieces of information but I kept it quite modern by the items I used.
Champagne Glass - Even though Champagne glasses have been around for years the type I used is very modern. This in the story represents the higher class citizens.
Bullets - Throughout the story there were multiple killings so I used 3 bullets to illustrate that and placed them in the glass.
Champagne - The liquid of champagne creates bubbles and the bubbles what are consealing the bullets represent the drugs and poison.
Dark Background - This is the feel of the overall story. the darkeness, the betrayal.
