Penguin Books Student Design Award gave the brief of constructing the book cover to 3 books, one of which was 'The Establishment and How They Get Away With It' by Owen Jones. I'd previously read this book and was completely blown away by it, being left with a feeling of dread, frustration, disbelief, fear and anger.
Owen Jones takes you on a journey, gives you the stories and the facts that come with it. leaving the audience with a sense of injustice and thoughts of 'How are these people getting away with this?'. One thing this book does incredibly well is shaping 'the face' of the Establishment despite it not having an identity. The Establishment is hidden yet has such huge power. So what does it look like? That's what my aim was in this brief.
I wanted to create imagery that developed the same feeling I felt when reading the book: fear, unsettledness and insecurity. Something that always creeps me out a little is vintage photographs (something I work with a lot in photomontage). The idea of capturing a moment in history and being able to manipulate that now, weirds me out: almost like I'm changing or manipulating time. The idea was to use vintage portraits of happy and 'wealthy looking' people and then manually manipulate them in my collage and photomontage style.
I started by using the iconic eye mask from the real books original cover and then made collages from those images as well as ones without the eye mask. The idea (despite being to show an identity) was to hide anything recognisable of a person so that we could view the illustrations and feel uncomfortable. We as humans don't like what we don't understand, its scares us and that what I tried to achieve in these images. You see people but their smiles don't look inviting instead sinister, developing a presence of unsettledness as we try to understand what we're observing.
Why are they smiling? Are they friendly? Why are they hiding?
Spread of journal
Cover options 1
Cover option 2
Pages from my Journal (above)
From all of my collages, I narrowed them down to a few of which I then put together as a book cover. I selected 4 images and adjusted the composition of them in relationship with the front and back cover, placing the given text alongside them. All examples are featured above.
Final submitted cover