Original Cover
Book Redesign
This assignment required us to take a book we have at home and redesign the cover. I chose Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr as my redesign. The original is a nice cover, however, I feel like it is vague with the illustration in regards to what the book is about. It just has a simple skull illustrated on it and I think as a non-Vonnegut reader you might pass by uninterested.
This is one of my favorite books ever so I wanted to really make the cover come to life with the bizarreness of the plot. It's part autobiography, part war, and part sci-fi novel so it's a little everywhere. Playing on the different themes I wanted to make the cover chaotic so I went with a collage motif including a UAP dropping bombs on the city of Dresden where the book mostly takes place. The book discusses alien abduction so I thought it was a cool way to mesh the war and science fiction themes. The background was made with a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator using different brushes I made with fire and then took stock images and tried to make them look as if they were cut out and taped together into one big mess.
I wanted to go with a celestial kind of vibe for the color scheme with a lot of really neon looking colors to give it a sci fi feel.
For the spine and the back of the book, I wanted to give it a cleaner look. I used the bomb as a nice little nugget along the spine to add visual interest. For the back, I used a dramatically scaled V to represent the title of the book and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. himself. Within that V I wanted the book's summary.
Cover Redesign
Bookmark Design
Google Advertisement
Instagram Story
LinkedIn Advertisement
Flyer Print
Once the cover was finished it was time for the campaign rollout. We were required to use the same elements for advertisements and marketing. I used the UAP, bombs, and abduction beam as my focal points for the ad designs to tie it to the cover. Included in the campaign are a bookmark, Instagram story, Google Ad, LinkedIn ad, and a printed flyer.
The entire campaign was a blast to work on and just had endless possibilities for how it was created, but I'm happy with the cohesiveness throughout each design. My goal was to make the design a little chaotic in the vein of Vonnegut's writings, but make it look well organized when all put together.
The book cover was designed in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. The bookmark and ads were all designed in Illustrator and Photoshop.