Book Cover Design

 I was tasked with redesigning a book cover for this module, and I decided to pick the one of the best books I’ve read recently, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The book is about a dystopian society, but instead of your straightforward dystopian society where everything is in ruins and the people are oppressed, the complete opposite is true. The people are well-off, have jobs that are tailored made for them, and everyone is open and free to be with everyone else. But Huxley shows that this way of life, although it seems glamorous and utopian on the surface is actually the more realistic way that a society would become dystopian. 

I wanted to get at the heart of this book which is all about uniformity, freedom, and fidelity. It’s about being true to the doctrine of “his Fordship” and trying to be one with everyone else. This is expressed in one of their tenets “everyone belongs to everyone else” and the great lengths that they go to to make as many “Bokanovsky” twins. In this age, people are made usually in test tubes (with the “savages” that live outside the limits of the city still procreating the traditional way) and a big portion of the beginning of the book goes into the actual “science” of how making humans in test tubes is possible. So I thought it fitting to zero in on this and make the cover display this to the viewer before they even begin reading. 

I knew I wanted to keep my color palette simple, so I decided that other than black and white, red would be my main hue. I posted two images into photoshop and used the brush tool to soften the edges of the images. I switched up the fonts to keep the text interesting. I found an image of the publishing logo that was transparent which made it look very nice against the off white cover. I also tweaked the levels and saturation to really make the red of the test tubes pop. I wanted to them images to produce a minor visceral feeling. If I had more time, I probably would have worked on something else for the spine. But all in all, I think it turned out better than I expected.