OUGD503 Jacked Book Cover

Author Drew Greenhalgh wanted to choose from a selection of designs for his first self-published online novel 'Jacked', a story which follows a businessman's life and how it changes after he strikes a deal with a gang member.

I chose this as a short brief as this was another competition brief, and I wanted to dedicate more time to live briefs from clients. However, I found that since the book hasn't been released, the amount of information we could work with was very limited.

Because of this, I thought it might be best to try to design something minimal, which could imply the storyline, leaving it open to develop. I started by looking at some minimal designers work and some designs of other book covers to see what I could do with the information given.

After looking at some of these covers, I still felt that I was too limited in my lack of knowledge of the storyline itself to be able to produce something that would visually do it justice.

I decided to explore the idea of including some sort of visual pun that would insinuate things about the story without outwardly saying it with an obvious image. I looked into the work of Noma Bar and some other designers in order for me to better understand how to approach this.