Art Culture Classics: Book Cover
Being an Art and Culture student, we learned over the course that there is no unique way to evaluate a situation or a piece of art that I wanted to apply for this project. As assigned by our Director, we had to recreate a book cover of the classic novel "The Plague". The book cover's central idea was not to serve anything on a platter and let the reader judge the book by its cover and go wrong at the end. One thing that COVID or any other plague taught us was to be responsible and stay at home. During this pandemic and The Plague outburst in Oran, people did not realize the intensity of the situation and kept travelling, which resulted in a disaster. The three stages that the research mentioned were people who acted naively and considered themselves immune and did not take the health advisory seriously. They did not stop travelling and partying because they got ill, acknowledging that it was a new virus and there were few doctors who could contribute, which led to the increase in the death toll.
Every pandemic can be prevented if we act responsibly and be honest with each other. If we could have focused on helping each other than acting racist and blaming each other for what happened, we could have been in a much better state. Every virus transmits through a medium or, in a laid language, a germ. Stereotypically, everyone imagines germs as a dark greenish round figure with light horns, which inspired the book's background colour. To show signs of drama and horror, I choose this dramatic font theme to grab the reader's attention. The black figure depicts the past and complements the horror theme, which develops along with the cover. The logo was inspired by a car manufacturer company, Bentley, using the original publishing companies' shapes. Being a historical event, I chose it to give a dark theme, and rather than giving it wings like the manufacturer, I decided to go with leaves around the penguin, just like the publisher. Following the design elements, the book cover came as a whole combination of highlights, mid-tones, and shadows and including a variety of organic and geometric shapes.
Following the main idea of not serving everything on a platter, the book cover would remind the reader of the pandemic they have heard or went through and will later realize that these are the three stages that, rather than preventing the infection in a small group, lead to a global pandemic.
