Penguin Student Design Competition: A Brief History of Time
Penguin Random House holds an annual cover design competition. The competition has three categories: Adult Fiction, Adult Non-fiction, and Children’s. The book for the Adult Non-fiction category when I entered was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Audience: The book was having its 30th anniversary, so the audience was primarily a new generation who were too young to read it at the time of the original publication. Being a non-fiction book designed to explain complex matters of astrophysics in a manner that non-physicists can understand, the majority of the expected audience was students and non-scientists who are interested in cosmology.
Posted Expectations: The brief stated that the design should break boundaries and “not look like a textbook you read in school”. The cover, front and back, should be a cohesive whole but the front cover should be able to stand on its own either in bookstore display or in an online purveyor like Amazon. The following bulleted list of requirements was specifically provided:
have an imaginative concept and original interpretation of the brief
be competently executed with strong use of typography
appeal to a contemporary readership
show a good understanding of the marketplace
have a point of difference from the many other book covers it is competing against
I produced 3 outcomes for this brief:
My first outcome was based on the idea of a 1970s style paperback cover. Seventies retro was starting to trend in design at the time and would have fit reader expectations. The retro look also spoke to the mention of history in the title, as well as the time period during which Hawking did most of his work which led to this book.
The bright, rainbow colored middle, surrounded by white space would draw attention and focus it on the title. At the same time, the rainbow colors spiraling in to a black circle was a representation of light being drawn into a black hole.
I chose the typeface Gill Sans for the title to further add to the retro feel. Gill Sans was chosen by Jan Tischold to be Penguin’s primary typeface when he developed the standardized Penguin cover, and has been associated with classic penguin books ever since. Running the title and subtitle on either side of the rainbow line gave it an additional feel of motion toward the “black hole”.
For my third design, I decided to produce a more colorful and energetic design. The background image is a colorful abstract that can be interpreted as a representation of the initial expansion of the universe, the inside of a wormhole, or a time-lapse photo of the movement of stars.
My title text was inspired by the double-slit experiment, which demonstrated that light acts as a particle and a wave. I also made the text more diffuse with each line to evoke the expansion of the universe.
For the rest of the text, I decided on the combination of Century Gothic for the more informational text of the title, author, and about text and Caslon for the more personal feel of review recommendations.
For the second outcome, I went with a more literal approach to the visual imagery. I created an image suggesting the universe shortly after the Big Bang in the top of an hour glass and a galaxy falling into the lower part of the glass. This represented both the passage of time and the process that led to the formation our current universe.
The black background both served as white space to draw attention to the illustration, as well as being representative of the emptiness of space.
The typeface that I chose for the title and author on this cover version was the more modern, but timeless Century Gothic.
