‘A Clockwork Orange’ Book Cover Redesign
Skills: Visual Research, Design Thinking, User Testing, Sketching, Mockups, Illustration, Typography, Print Design
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop
Timeline: Spring 2022
Project Overview
A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian fiction about Alex, a juvenile in a future England. After committing a series of crimes, Alex is arrested and made subject to inhuman psychological punishment by the government.
For as common as the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” is, people still do every time they look at the art on the front of a story. Although there is nothing technically wrong with the existing book covers for A Clockwork Orange, I wanted to try my hand at redesigning it in order to show a more modern approach to visualize the story.
Goal
Create multiple iterations of a redesigned cover for A Clockwork Orange using modern styles and techniques to create more inviting artwork for modern readers.
Research
To start my research, I read A Clockwork Orange to get a better idea of the themes and symbols within the story. Understanding this would give me a better feel of the feeling that I wanted to create when someone viewed my covers. Some notable concepts that could be used in the creation of these covers are:
Clock
Gangs
Crime
Orange
Prison/police
Darkness/dark colors
Prison Bars
Alone – negative space
After becoming more acquainted with the story, I conducted visual research, viewing the existing covers for the stories as well as covers of other books. This gave me a better idea of the elements that would need to be included, as well as some styles that could be used.
One challenge that I noted early on would be the design for the spine and the back cover as these are areas that I have not worked on at a high level before.
Sketching
Using the ideas noted in my research, I sketched a variety of ideas for the cover. Quantity was prioritized over quality here in order to get all of the ideas out of my head and onto paper. This allowed me to better visualize everything and see what would work best.
Design
I decided on picking my three favorite concepts for the cover and creating a first draft of those using Adobe InDesign. I created these to the highest quality that I could, knowing that revisions would be made after the fact.
Initial Testing
To test each iteration of the book cover, I printed and presented them to other designers to get their feedback. After the first round of revisions, the following insights were made.
Readability – ensuring that my typography was tweaked on each iteration to ensure high readability was needed. This included adding more contrast, type weight and size, and type justification.
Information – adding reviewer quotes and publisher information will help to “sell” the book to viewers.
Design – All of the designs had areas where they could be tweaked. However, the third one shown below was simply not working. I would scrap this one and create another iteration to work off of.
Reevaluation
The three book cover iterations went through redesigns and testing five times to ensure that I came out with the best result. Each time, I tweaked the design a little more to ensure it was of the highest quality.
Conclusion
After multiple times redesigning the covers, I ended up with two that I felt were strong and that could be used as the cover. Each of them focuses on different themes:
The first one uses a bold orange to point back to the name of the story and catch the eye of viewers. It shows a lone silhouette in an empty room, illustrating themes of loneliness and isolation. The silhouette appears to be in pain, illustrating the psychological torture that Alex went through during the story.
The second covers sports Alex’s iconic bowler hat under a spotlight. The dark colors in this cover illustrate the dark themes of the book, and the spotlight points back to the legal processes and torture that Alex was put through. Additionally, a brass winding key is seen on the top of the bowler hat, showing that Alex was made into a robot after his psychological treatment.
Working on this project showed me the importance of visual research and feedback. Understanding that the first version was not final was crucial to this design process, and creating many iterations helped me to come out with the best result in the end.
