What makes you pick up a book off the shelf? What entices you to crack it open? Many of us really do judge a book by its cover, so how do you convey the depth of a book through just one page?

The Great Gatsby is an iconic book set in the 1920s. It's synonymous with the Art Deco style (popularized by the movie adaption starring DiCaprio). The challenge in designing a cover for Gatsby lies in originality. What has never been done with Gatsby?

While Art Deco is the immediate thought for the 1920s, another art movement started making waves in Europe a few years prior. The Dada movement sought to disrupt and challenge the current ideas of art. My first cover design is Dada-inspired, showing disregard for conventional typography and taking cues from collages and cut-and-paste artwork. The interior of the book pushes the idea in incorporating cover elements into the chapter headers and large, colorful page numbers that bleed into the text. 

My second design is tailored to a higher-end clientele. The typography composing the cover draws influence from the Art Deco style, while the arrangement of the text embraces the heart of Dadaism. The type setting within the book itself is clean and minimalistic, while still challenging the conventions of typical book layouts. Embracing white space rather than simply fitting the text onto the page presents the book as more than a means to communicate the story, but as a work in and of itself.