Collage

From the direction discussion I went back to the sketches produced and decided to firstly work on the collage effect of the newspaper cut outs, focusing on the front cover design before deciding on the response to design fully. Rather than cutting the words out and having straight edges, the words were ripped out to create a more natural effect.

The sketches were the initial starting point with the digital designs. Through experimenting with different layouts with the newspaper cut outs it became clear that the front cover was over cluttered and the additional text was not clear to read. This was something that was agreed by peers however it was suggested that limiting the collage area may overcome this. As the individual words had jagged edges this was also said that it reminded people of a ransom note, which is not the reason behind this design. To overcome this, the space around the wording will be trimmed to have more of a clean look.  

After making this change to the design I had further discussions with peers to gain their opinion and feedback on the design. The comments received involved questions as to why the colour orange was chosen. The reason for this is that it is the original colour that Penguin used for the publishing of the book. #ff6833 is also a common colour used in crime genres. However, the overall comments said that allowing white space around the area of text allows for the copy content to be clearly displayed and still displays the importance of the newspaper in the story. 

Some comments still led towards the title of the book being difficult to determine due to the collage of wording. A way to overcome this would be to just use the individual words instead of using a collage. This is something that will require further feedback on. The background colour was also experimented with as there were concerns with whether the orange is appropriate as the reason behind the colour choice was required. This reasoning is not something that would be presented with the design for the competition unless put through to the second stage. However, as the judges are members of the Penguin team, I would hope that they would understand the choice of using #ff6833.  Using black as the background colour would make the book more like the others of its genre and therefore not stand out.  It also does not fit the 'bold' appearance that is mentioned in the brief.