Book Cover Sketches

I'm very excited for this module's project. I'm sure that many people can relate to the feeling of reading a book that would've been damn-near perfect if it wasn't for the subpar cover design. However, I don't necessarily feel this way about the book I picked (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) but it just happened to be the last book that I read. My own copy has a person on the cover with gears and machine parts where a torso and head should be. The mixture of machine and human, along with the religious posture of the person all foreshadow how the society in Huxley's book is run like a Ford manufacturing plant and the religious devotion its citizens have to the government. The minimalist style really emphasizes the person/machine creature. And I don't think that my designs are better but they're hopefully as good.

My first book cover sketch highlights the society's obsession with creating people who are a similar to each other as possible because that would leave less people to proselytize. I would create a pattern of people's faces on the cover, the spine, and the back cover. And the color palette would probably be monochromatic, perhaps with a black background, white text, and pinkish faces.

The second design again emphasizes how standardized the creation of humans is, because people are created in test tubes in bulk, unless they are alphas. I would have an assembly line like the one that was created by Henry Ford (because Ford is their equivalent of God) with humans on the line instead of car parts. The back cover continues this idea, but the assembly line's path is curved, similar to a snake. I'm not sure what color palette I would use.

The third cover is an image of a test tube that has fallen over and its contents spilling out. This relates to how people are created. I changed the text presentation a bit on this design by having the author's name appear in the test tube contents. I did the same thing on the back cover with the book description appearing in the test tube contents. I think the color palette would be monochromatic as well, with a white background and a dark red for the contents

The fourth design is pretty similar to the original cover design. I really like the use of machine parts because it implies coldness or lack of feeling, and rigidity, two things which are invariably present in dystopian societies. I wanted to keep the feel of the original design and luckily it still works without the inclusion of a human subject. I haven't picked the color palette, yet.

Book Description: "Brave New World" is a dystopian novel set in a futuristic society, where people are genetically engineered and conditioned to conform to specific social classes and roles. The novel follows the story of Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus intellectual who feels alienated from his society, and his acquaintance with John the Savage, a man from a primitive "Savage Reservation" who challenges the conformity of the World State. Throughout the novel, Huxley explores themes such as the dangers of social engineering and the loss of humanity in a society where individuality and free will are suppressed. The characters' struggles with their own identities and desires also illustrate the conflicts between personal freedom and social control.