Penguin Book Covers

For my 3 Penguin Book covers I decided not to base my series on a genre of writing, but instead covers for a prolific author.

In researching Penguin modern classic books I discovered that Virginia Woolf was one of the most frequent authors names popping up on the list of books in the series. Researching into Virginia Woolf was eye opening as I found out about her educated and interesting life, with bouts of mental illness and a heavy interest in feminism and lesbian themes.
I decided from here that I will portray the themes of women and Virginia Woolf - hereby dubbed 'Women and Woolf' through creating covers for 3 of her books. Orlando and Mrs Dalloway are lighter fiction books with strong female protagonists, and A Room Of One's Own is a feminist text in the form of a book length essay which explores women as writers of and characters in fiction.

I experimented with using the Marber Grid in my book covers, but didn't like the result.
Therefore I decided not to heavily adapt the original Marber grid as I think the layout of it works best when the cover is broken up into sections. For my front covers I liked the idea of using negative space as much as possible - so removed the lines that would typically break up the title, author and main illustration. Instead, I aligned the title text differently as I felt it looked better and more streamlined. All text on the front page is aligned to the right, and to eachother, and the penguin logo stays in the top left hand corner. I

 

The content of the design itself is simple. The negative space allows the focal points of the cover to stand out. On each cover is an arrangement of lines, each representing a major section of the book.

I initially chose to work with Helvetica as the typeface for the books, but discovered that the book covers didn't look right. Instead of using Helvetica I discovered the signature typeface of Penguin books is Gill Sans. After changing the typeface to this, the covers immediately felt as if they could be real penguin books.

Cover using Helvetica

Cover using Gill Sans

A Room of One's Own focuses on the quote: 'A woman must have money and a room of her own to write.' The box represents the said room.
Mrs Dalloway is a fictional story featuring a man and a woman who's paths cross. I have shown this using a cross, or intersecting lines.
Orlando is perhaps the most interesting with the protagonist of the story randomly switching sexes and becoming a female from a male. The Y shapes here represent each sexes reproductive parts.

Originally I wanted to avoid using gendered colours (pink for females and blue for males) however I thought that using them in this context would lend a better understanding to the icons on the covers and make them more relevant to the theme of the books (Women and Woolf). For the exact colours I used Pantone's colours of the year 2016: Rose Quartz and Serenity.

I did use a lighter tint of Serenity as I felt the blue was too harsh and dark against the pink, and as the books have a feminine theme, I did not want the pink to be washed out.

As well as the front covers I also designed a timeline of Romek Marber's life to go on the reverse of the covers.

I continued to use Gill Sans as my typeface to tie in with the front of the covers.