Crime & Punishment
In my literature classes I learned to have an appreciation for literature. I really loved the stories we read in class and one that captured my interest was Crime & Punishment. I really enjoyed reading this book. The story inspired me to want to make a cover for it. Initially this project started as a self starter project but I never finished it because of time. Luckily in my typography class they asked that we make a book cover with inner pages. And of course I had to take advantage and finish up the project I started on my own. Below is the final cover I designed for Crime & Punishment. For more background on the final cover see midpage.
**Front and Back cover designs and inner pages layouts by Jobana Weber, Inner page Illustrations by Harry Brockway and Francois Rouget.
Initial Cover Ideas
Below are two extra cover ideas. The initial idea started with the left cover (Skull & Axe). Since the writer is Russian, I wanted to keep the Russian influence on the cover. I wanted to try somewhat of a constructivism look and this is from where the colors and text where influenced from. The skull reflects the death of Raskolnikov's landlord and how he went about killing here. At the end I did not like the placement of the text. I felt the word Punishment was too long and it looked off. Not only that but I felt the picture gave away too much of the book.
Then I came up with second idea on the right (door and shadow) which represents a scene in the book and the text once again was not to my liking and again the image was giving away too much. Overall the most challenging part of this project was text placement and style.
After much thought and research I realized that lot of people had already made covers of the same color and used similar images. So I had to come up with something a bit different. I thought about the story and the notes I took on it and remembered Raskolnikov was paranoid because he felt/was guilty of what he had done to his landlord and this immediately made me think of a scene in Handmaids Tale, in which all the girls pointed their fingers to the girl in the hot seat to make her feel ashamed and guilty of her "sins". This is where I got the idea of the fingers pointing to the title and murder weapon for my final cover as shown below.
Second to final cover design
In this final Cover I wanted to keep the Russian influence, therefore I used the Russian flag colors. The crime in the book had to have been bloody therefore I made the word "Crime" in red and "Punishment" in white, joined by the murder weapon and surrounded by the pointing fingers. In this cover the one thing I did have to change was the text on the authors name to make it more darker for better readability (shown in top cover image).
The Inner Pages
Title page
Below are some of the inner pages. Although the book cover has a modern look, I wanted mix in a bit of the modern with the old style layout. I ensured to keep the title looking the same as the cover for the cover page. I also used an illustration by Harry Brockway which is representative of Raskolnikov.
Table of Contents
The book has 6 parts and each part contains about 6-7 chapters. Therefore to keep it short I put the pages that direct the reader to the parts to save space, and cut down on the amount of text that would be needed to add each chapter. On the left page I wanted to add a map of the area in which the story take place in, but it was difficult finding an old map that was representative of the time and that it was clear. To fix this I added a picture of St. Petersburg (where Raskolnikov lived in the story) that represented the time period of the story.
The Chapter Page
The title of the chapter is "The Origin of Punishments". For this page I wanted to start with an image of punishment and I chose an image of Quasimodo on the Pillar by Illustrator Francois Rouget. I felt the image represented what punishment was for those times.
