Norwegian Wood Japanese Book Cover Research - Penguin Books - Competition brief

For part of my research I looked into the design of Japanese book covers and the typical style that they adopt. The book is set in Japan and the main character Toru, reads a lot throughout the book and there are several scenes set in a bookshop. Often they use very thin line in quite illustrative ways, as shown in the books below. A style like this could be experimented with, with big line work and small text.

l also briefly looked at Japanese ink paintings, considering the more classic style of Japanese design. This became quite informative in my work, as the fluid brush motion seemed like an interesting way to create a 'moving' illustration. The colours used, again red, white and black, were also seen across many of the illustrations I found. This seemed like something I could experiment with further.