Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Drawing the Detectives

On monday we were given the task to create a book cover design for an Agatha Christie novel as part of the Guardians celebration of what would have been the authors 125th birthday. We were encouraged to look at colour theory and typographic design. We picked a book title out of a bucket at random so that everyone would have something different. I picked 'The Moving Finger' a Miss Marple Mystery.
When doing some research into the book I found out that it was about a village that begins to receive anonymous letters accusing people of different crimes. I also looked into some already existing book covers for the moving finger and thought about colour theory.

My First Design
My initial idea was to included a letter on a dark wooden bench. I also wanted the letter to be faded so that the author and title would stand out. I knew I wanted to use the authors signature as it is a common theme on Agatha Christie novels. I also knew I wanted her name to be the largest text as she is very famous for writing mysteries. I choose a sans serif font to make the title appear serious and more old fashioned as the story was originally published in 1942. However I was not completely satisfied with my final design and decided I needed to further develop my ideas.

Final Design
I took some of the ideas from my initial design but developed them by adding a pointing finger as it links more to the title. I did this by taking a photograph of a hand and then drawing it with my graphics tablet. I also lowered the opacity of the letter so the text would stand out more. I did not like the brown desk idea so I decided to combine some colours that I think relate to the mystery book genre. I choose green because penguin made all of their mystery book covers green and I choose Dark blue because it reminds me of fog, shadows and all things mysterious. I also made Agatha Christie's signature red because it can relate to the story as there is romance and death.

I then uploaded my cover to the guardian website.
It then got published to the guardian page.




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