Introduction To Penguin Design Awards

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As a conclusion to this term’s IA4002 module’s focus on The Frame, we are asking you to engage with a national student book cover completion. A classic design device using the idea of the single frame or the fixed viewpoint can be found in propaganda and advertising. Distilling complex and rich ideas down to a single persuasive image employing dynamic relationships between image and text. These things might come in the form of the poster, an online banner or viral campaign and of course, the book cover.

The Penguin Student Design Awards has run successfully for many years asking design students to reimagine and redesign the cover, spine and back cover for either an Adult Fiction, Adult Non-Fiction and Children’s Fiction book. We have had award winning and shortlisted designs from our students before and we would love to see you have a go as well.

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Brief

Following the workshop These Things You Never Knew You Wanted where you explored and experimented with the idea of persuasion through image, the spoken & written word and design, we would like you to chose one of the titles for the Penguin Design Awards and explore the relationship between ideas, image and text within the fixed frame of the book cover. This year the choices are Norwegian Wood (Links to an external site.) by Haruki Murakami, The Establishment (Links to an external site.) by Owen Jones and Wonder (Links to an external site.) by R.J. Palacio. You are asked to choose one of these titles, thoroughly research the text and it’s context including past and present designs and markets for book covers.

 

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Read the brief.

You must download penguin’s competition brief and follow their instructions carefully:  

Read and reread Penguin’s brief for your text taking into account what they are looking for and the specific technical requirements of the layout. The size of the document, where the crop marks sit, how the cover, spine and back cover work. You must use the template they give you in the brief, it is recommended that you explore Adobe InDesign to set type and layout your design.

 

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Do your research.

Begin right away. Go to libraries and bookshops to analyse book covers. How are they designed? What stands out? What do you respond to? Why? Consider the font cover, back cover and spine as three different viewing spaces to read your design consider how readers engage with those spaces. We generally read the spine first, then the cover and then the back cover. Also consider how these different faces work together as a whole. Research the book you are working with. You may not have time to read the book, but you can do thorough reading around it to uncover the themes and tone of the work you are representing.

 

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Does it work?

The outcome for this brief is intended as a piece of print. Therefore you must see your work in print. Print out all of your designs at full scale and see how they work. Wrap them around books to test how your designs function, make notes and refine.

On Friday 11th January you are required to bring in all of your research for the project as well as a selection of designs developed using the template and printed out for us to test on a dummy book. Be imaginative, be inventive and have fun with this. We want to see you come up with new ideas and interpretations for these covers that haven’t been explored before.

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