OUGD503 Penguin Random House UK Student Design Award 2017 - Idea 1

Idea 1:
Within the book Perry Smith describes a recurring dream involving a tree full of diamonds guarded by a snake and a yellow parrot that saves him. The Bird first comes to Perry's dream and rescues him when he is being beaten by the nun, the bird who, "blinded the nuns with its beak, fed apon their eyes, slaughtered them as they 'pleaded for mercy', then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to 'paradise'" (93).

The dream relates to the relationships that Perry has throughout his life. The dreams change slightly over time but the parrot always remained the same, to save him. It acts as a symbol of hope and imagination, it also seems to show gleams of his personality through that representation.

This is an idea which I think is really unique, it hasn't been done before and can hopefully make me stand out within the competition. I think that the parrot is a really good symbol of meaning within the book. Within the design I also wanted to consider references to art movements at the time - one of them being psychedelia. I think that this will work perfectly as the parrot is a dream so I want to consider how I could portray it in a trippy dream like state. Pop art is also associated with the time of the crime, I want to look at how I could play around with colour to provide striking visuals.

I started off my research by looking at images of yellow parrots, although I couldn't find a completely yellow parrot, the underneath of what you'd expect a parrot to look like is a nice yellow.

I liked this image of a parrot in flight with it's wings outstretched as if in protection, sort of having angelic qualities.

I then edited the photo to remove the background.

Taking this image into illustrator to then create more of a silhouette and having more of a print quality.

I really like the effect that it has produced and I think I could work well with colour to produce some striking effects.

Taking this into photoshop I then edited it to be yellow.

Working with this as the main central focus I started to apply it to the template adding in type.

This is my first initial mock up of the idea.

I've downloaded a typeface called Droid to use as the decorative type for the title of the book, author and sub heading. However I wouldn't be able to use this for the main body as it will be illegible. For the body text I have used Gill Sans, which does work but I don't know if it looks to friendly in comparison to the other type.

Tutor Feedback (Simon Harrison):
- Test out a black cover background
- Look at book colours within the crime genre to see if mine will stand out amongst them.
- Different scale/positions of the bird
- Look at the subtext - doesn't really work for legibility in current typeface, match body text. 
- Back text could be changed, consider helvetica
- Gain feedback on what bird poses portray e.g. aggression, protection
- Likes the uniqueness of the idea - come up with multiple variations.