Norwegian Wood Initial Designs - Penguin Books - Competition Brief

Initially I began making designs for the firefly concept. These designs all shared a similar aesthetic involving the colours red, white and black and using Futura as a typeface. The red, white and black colour pallet was chosen to connote the traditional colours of Japanese ink printing and the colours seen on the Japanese flag. These also work to convey themes of death, romance and sex, which are key within the book.

The first design uses line which varies in thickness, showing a link to Japanese ink painting. The firefly is shown to be resting in the hands - to represent the connection with Toru and how Nako is quite unwell throughout the book. This design works well and gives more of a clear relationship between the firefly and Toru (the holder), the second place winner of the 2018 Adult Fiction award suggested it is important that the cover conveys the relationship between the characters. This design almost looks like a traditional Penguin novel, rather than something contemporary - leading me to experiment with a more simplistic and bold approach.

The next design I tried involved a simple firefly in the centre of the design. This is something I thought could work after having looked at the winning designs of 2018 - which also adopt a simple, central symbolic approach. I experimented with how the firefly could be illustrated: changing the bulb, giving it antenna, adding smaller details. The design involving the red circle for the bulb seemed to work best as this also references the Japanese flag - which is mentioned throughout the book by Toru - adding an additional link.

The next designs I tried involved the Norwegian Wood record, again these were simple but quite striking. The worked much better when the Norwegian Wood aspect was centralised and vertically read. However, the top too designs felt too simple, so I decided to introduced a line from the Norwegian Wood Beatles song - 'And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown'. This references how Nako eventually leaves Toru by committing suicide. Throughout the book there is also a lot of imagery involving birds - flying together, flying alone, all linking to the quote. Through the addition of musical notes this conveys the fact it is a lyric - I must consider that this could have copy right issues - it also could be misconstrued as a tagline for the book - which it is not.

The reason all the designs have used Futura is because the typeface offers a contemporary and stylistic appearance. The angular shape links to the harsher themes of the book and it is bold and clear. I have been considering that this cover design could link to my other two competition entries by making sure they all use Futura. This is an interesting constraint as I will have to make sure the typeface is used in a way which works for each genre.