Recent sales figures in the US have confirmed that readers are returning to the printed word as ebook sales
start to decline, so our annual book cover design project feels surprisingly relevant this year. This time around the project was 'Huge Reads' - a proposed Penguin initiative to persuade readers to tackle bigger books that might be challenging, time-consuming, difficult or perhaps just literally too heavy to carry around. The students had to select three titles from a series of seven classic novels of more than 700 pages, and design the covers purely in typography.
A good example that blends the literary themes with minimalism and a sense of 'huge' expanse and drama came from Hannah Bleck, who chose George Eliot's Middlemarch, Melville's Moby Dick, and Tolstoy's epic Anna Karenina.
The jacket blurbs on the back are left-ranged and spaced right across the page, whilst the front covers each feature subtle tweaks to typography with a classic-looking serif typeface and brooding colour scheme. A bigger selection of work from this project will be going on our pinterest boards soon.
