Contemporary Book Cover - The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale is most commonly known and associated with the white bonnet, the red cloak, or the silhouette of the main character June Osborn (Offred). This book jacket combines this imagery but is designed in a new light, using colors that differ from the original book's jacket and twisting it into a fresh look of this iconic series. I created the silhouette of the bonnet with red instead of white and used yellow to mimic the skin tone of the handmaid, giving it a sense of mystery and ambiguity as to who the handmaid could be.

The scratch over the eyes illustrates the erasure of her individuality. The back cover includes a motif of eyes, paralleling the stripping of her identity as those in power watch over her every move; this is known in the book as the quote “Under his eye.”

Classic Book Cover - Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim is a classic novel written by Kingsley Amis, which centers around a young professor/lecturer Jim Dixon, struggling to keep his job at a high-class university. This satirical novel follows Dixon and his wild antics, featuring themes of smoking, school, luck, and social classes. This design mainly highlights the aspect of school and smoking, two significant recurring symbols of the novel.

A cigarette is placed in the center, burning a hole through a paper seen from the cover and the back of the novel. To achieve this, I photographed a crumbled sheet of paper and used hand-done typography on the post-it note and index card, as well as the custom style of the title.