The Penguin Design Award is an opportunity for students on an Art or Design course or degree level to engage in design for publishing during their studies. The brief is to design a whole new cover look in order to reinvent the children's book 'Grimm's Fairy Tales'.
This brief is to be Illustration lead with a strong use of typography, during my research I saw some strong designers who used a lot of detail in their work and it made me think about some of my past projects and the fact that I tend to be on the minimal side naturally when it comes to ideas and designs. So with this in mind I wanted to really push myself to try new things for this brief and get out of my comfort zone.
What lead my ideas and gave me inspiration in this brief were particularly Rohan Easons black and white drawings and the technique of drawing a detailed scene and then carving it out on paper. I started out trying to do a very basic tree scene as I wanted it to be in some way visually linked to the brothers Grimm.
So this is an photograph of the basic scene I drew and then cut out.
But since I cut out the whole thing I knew I needed some kind of background, so I used the large light box in the classroom as I kind of luminous backdrop. I actually really liked this visual and my ideas just progressed from there.
The next thing I did after the tree scene is think about other scenes I could design and then cut out.
So I started to draw a scene, since it was to be a book cover I had to have some text in there. I found a really nice Sans fonts that was perfect for this project and arranged to how I wanted it.
After I found the right font to use I started to draw the scene around it, there was so many things that people associate with the brothers Grimm fairy tales and that are mentioned in the books. The archways at the top of this scene is from my favorite Grimm Fairy Tale 'The Twelve Dancing Princesses', it is the entrance to the secret underground castle where the princesses sneak away to every night to dance with the twelve princes. I had to add a little something from one of my favorites.
This is a photograph that I took to document the process of me cutting out my entire scene and yes it took forever.
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| My finished cut out scene |
When I finished cutting my entire scene I then put it on the light box just like the tree's and took photographs to get the lighting effect how I wanted. I really like this image and all the cutting out was worth it because it worked out exactly how I wanted it, a lovely fairy tale scene with very dreamy lighting.
I wondered what it would look like in black and white so I decided to see what would happen if I scanned the cut out image.
This is the digital image that I got when I scanned the cut out into the computer then used Photoshop to invert the colours, I liked the black and white picture but it lost the dreaminess the original one had.
I decided to try designing another cut out scene since the first one was just a very rough draft.
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| Front cover |
This is the second cut out image I designed. This time I focused solely on a wooded scene just like my original inspiration. I used the same text placement and font as the first scene as I didn't want that to change, but I also took care to create room on the bottom of the page for the names of the brothers as Penguin stated they should be there. I also took the time to create the spine of the book as well since the brief stated it was to create the whole book.
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| Spine |
And lastly I designed and cut out a back cover to finish off the entire thing.
I then used all these images and digitally put them together to create the whole cover look.
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| Final design |
This is my finished cover look for the Brothers Grimm book. Originally I was going to leave the back light alone but once they were all together the book looked old and outdated and kind of reminded me of the colour or porridge, so instead I decided that if I used traditional methods to create the cover, since its all hand carved and there isn't a straight line in sight, then I should use a modern bold colour as a contrast against the old worldly cut out, the bold red/pink colour keeps the traditional method of cut out still looking fresh.
