Making a mock up

For this exercise I decided to follow the brief for the Penguin Design Award - James and the Giant Peach competition. I'm not going to enter it, but I wanted to see if I could follow a brief through.

I started with jotting down the most memorable images from my own reading of the book, first when I was a child and later to my own children.

Bearing in mind the space required for the text on the brief, I did a few sketches. I refered to the book to develop the images that were clearest in my memory. These were: Sponge and Spiker - the cruel Aunts, the Peach growing on the 'dead' tree;

 the Peach being attacked by sharks and lifted out by silks attached to sea gulls; the Peach crashing through the rainbow,

and the peach impaled on the top of the Empire State Building.

The brief called for a new interpretation, but it also dictated the exact text - including the words 'illustrated by Quentin Blake" - this gave me cause for some concern, because, nothing is more irritating to me than having images on the front cover of a book which clash or tell a different story to the images inside. For this reason I decided to reference the Quentin Blake illustrations incorporated. I also decided to go down a slightly Tim Burtonesque route. This was partly because the text for the back cover was quite dark,


Introducing James Trotter and his aunts, Sponge and Spiker.

James and the Giant Peach

An enormous escaped rhinoceros from London Zoo has eaten James’s parents. And it gets worse! James is packed off to live with his two really horrible aunts, Sponge and Spiker. Poor James is miserable, until something peculiar happens and James finds himself on the most wonderful and extraordinary journey he could ever imagine 

…As it also mentioned James and his two Aunts, I felt that I wanted to see them in action so, again I felt it important to reference Quentin Blake's illustrations. I went back to the text for descriptions of the Aunts and the Insects. I deliberately avoided copying the Blake Illustrations, but incorporated many of the same elements, so that the cover and the internal illustrations would work together.

 I wanted continuity between the spine and the front cover. I also considered that the peach and a creature should just be visible on the spine. I tested out the available space for text by making a visual mock up. 

In terms of colour, I wanted to keep a limited palette, with the Peach standing out as a beacon of light symoblising James Adventure against his drab, unpleasant colourless existance with his two aunts. I decided that the peach colour would be most dramatic in terms of standing out on the book shelves if the background was black. This fitted as most of the adventure takes place at night, although I stretched the point by spreading the black to the background of the New York city skyline, mainly for impact and also because it enhanced the dark fairytale quality that I was after. 

I then played with various fonts, but in the end I decided to go for hand drawn fonts, which I drew onto tracing paper, scanned and then re-inforced on the computer. I used Charcoal (the most natural that I could find on my computer) for the precis and the information on the back cover. So, this was the final mock up:

It was a very useful exercise working all the way from the brief - and I love this book. If I were to have entered the competition, I expect that they would not have liked the fact that I kept close to the original Blake illustrations, but personally, I think it works quite well.