Tuesday June 26, 2012
Winners of Design A Cover survey
WE asked you to tell us what book you’d love to design a cover for, and received replies on everything from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, with designs ranging from the traditional to the truly wacky!
Congratulations to the five most creative responses to our Design A Cover survey; you will be receiving a set of three books from the Penguin English Library. Here are the winners and excerpts of their ideas:
Our Design A Cover winners will be getting a set of three books from the Penguin English Library, which offers classics in lovely new covers. Tan Wei Jer, 24, has a cover idea for John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener that depicts a green maze with a route marked in white leading through it. “The whole confusing concept interprets the storyline as well as maintaining a clear picture of a gardener,” he says.
Diane Yap, 19, wants to design the cover for A Study In Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle with “two identical pills, each in separate miniature glass bottles with cork stoppers, set in the centre of a crimson-red page. The title isn’t printed on the cover, only on the spine.” She says this represents the story, where the murderer kills his victims by making them choose between two pills, and also shows that Sherlock Holmes stories aren’t just about Victoriana, magnifying glasses and deerstalkers.
Tan Ping Teng, 16, describes her cover idea for Neil Gaiman’s brilliant Coraline in rhyme:
A cover of midnight blue,
Represents a night so cool,
It grows darker to the left side,
Similar to evening changing to night,
Just like the hands of a clock that abides,
Thus the back cover is less bright,
Two black, four-holed buttons adorn the front cover,
A black spool and silver needle accompanies and hovers,
The shadows of the items visible,
So the creepiness does not go invisible,
“Coraline” in a hairy and thorny font across the front,
below “by Neil Gaiman” in a smaller font seemingly blunt,
A summary on the back cover,
All words of a shiny silver colour,
The bottom right houses a silhouette of a cat,
Across it, holding a large black key is a rat,
The centre houses the title,
A four-holed black button replaces the “O” so vital.
Ong Chin Huat, 48, suggests, for the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, having Jay Gatsby lying on a float in his enormous swimming pool, which shows a reflection of his mansion. “Instead of the cliched images associated with the Roaring Twenties, the reflection of the mansion is symbolic of the material wealth he has accumulated that is fleeting and ephemeral. There is also a touch of poetic irony in that despite the lavish parties he has thrown for countless people, he nevertheless remains alone and isolated from everyone,” he explains.
Tengku Amina Munira, 29, has an idea for the cover of Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “I would include a minimalist illustration of one of the most hilarious scenes from this tragicomic tale. Dr Urbino, the rich husband of the lead female character, Fermina, is falling from a mango tree as he attempts to rescue his wayward parrot. While this may not be a major event in the book, it is one of its most memorable, and represents a turning point for the lead characters.
“I would love for a book cover to be just that: a minimalist image that provides a small glimpse into the novel, to present the reader with something that is deliberately; a little mysterious, a little misleading, a little comic, but nevertheless respectful of the author’s writing.”
Prizes, courtesy of Penguin Malaysia, will be posted to all winners. If the address you provided is inaccurate, e-mail star2@thestar.com.my and give us the correct one.
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