Classic Covers

Classic Cover 1

Classic Cover 2 

After researching into the classic covers of To Kill a Mockingbird I discovered that majority of which carry out a single similarity, they are all obvious in meaning, giving the audience a visual idea of the context; which is normally criteria associated with children’s books. The second example here actually shows a scene from the film, which then turns the book into a literary version of the film, when in fact it was vice versa. Although this may be an interesting concept to get viewers of the film to become the audience for the original book.

The first book cover follows the successful Marber grid, which can be found on many original penguin classic books. This was successful as a cover which became part of the classic series, this could be interesting to explore in a new way; possibly breaking down and rearranging the grid. The second example doesn’t really reveal much in terms of being designed to a grid, it in fits with keeping the title as the main focal point of the piece. Yet the cover has multiple type faces and no colour scheme, so I don’t believe it is successful. This is something I will be bearing in mind when developing my cover design as I don’t want to overpower the cover with colour, typefaces and imagery; this makes the book look not classic and takes away from the books massive part in literature. Therefore the first design is more successful, being simplistic, yet it is too obvious.