Murder Most Unladylike - Cover Redesign
Penguin Cover Design Award
The Penguin Cover Design Award is your opportunity to take on the role of a book cover designer and build your portfolio. For this year, there were three books to choose from, and of those three my group were given 'Murder Most Unladylike' by Robin Stevens. This is a book about two girls who are trying to solve a mystery murder when they come upon a dead body in their school gym. This book is a part of a series of books that has been published by Robin Stevens.
Because this was a small group project, each of us in the group had a different role to do. I was in charge of doing the research elements and also doing the presentation because I was able to put together bits of work at the last minute.
We were given a detailed brief on how the book should be and what it should have. It also included the specific document sizes and specifications so that the redesign fits Penguin's book cover guidelines should one of the entry's get printed and published.
As part of the research, I was told to research and look into the story of the book and what takes place without giving too much away. I looked into things like the characters, where and when it was set, the target audience that the book might be aiming for, the genre of the book amongst other things.
The next thing I did was analyse the original book cover design wise. I found this part of the research a bit difficult since I was the only one in the group looking into the original book cover and trying to analyse it, which meant that I could only find a few things. However, I did pick up on a few things that instantly hinted that this was a children's book. The first thing was that there were a lot of illustrations used in the book cover which made it obvious. The second thing was that the typography had been manipulated with quite a lot which meant that the designer was trying to be very playful with the design of the book cover.
This is the book cover that I uploaded because I wanted to take part in the competition myself and so I decided to hand in my own design. I am really glad I took part in this competition and although I did not win, I am proud of my effort and the work I put in. As a group however, we did upload our book cover redesign but had no luck with that design too. Overall it was a great experience as this was my first time taking part in a design competition and I look forward to taking part in more design competitions in the future.
