Puffin Design Award

The brief for this year's Puffin Design Award was to create a book jacket for The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. After reading the book it was clear that there was more to the story than just the gangs, greasers and fighting. There were a surprising amount of deeper themes which I thought were key to the success of the novel. One of these was the vigilante justice that is carried out by the Greasers and the Soc's, and the immense power having a weapon gives the carrier. There is a huge turning point in the story that all pivots around the knife. I tried to combine these elements in my initial ideas.

Another recurring moral of the story is that regardless of which 'gang' you belong to, everyone is the same deep down. I wanted to Illustrate this by having a dust jacket like below with a bloodstain on, which when removed shows a jumper belonging to one of the Soc's with the blood seeping through. The blood is universal and everyone in the story is affected in the same way by the violence. Death is always death.

I also thought about the way the whole jacket could be used to portray a scene.  The sunset is often used as the unifying symbol between the two groups, that they both watch the same sunset. The front cover shows the silhouette of Ponyboy with a fight going on behind, the back cover is Cherry watching the same fight under the same sunset, so the reader can see there are two sides to the story, but common themes.

This was also interesting to try because there is quite a lot of information that you have to use on the cover such as copy on the front and back as well as the logos and barcode to work around or include in the design.

My final outcome is shown above. It combines some of the concepts I thought about in my other ideas. One of the most important things for me when I was designing the cover was that it had to have impact and also make the reader think in some way. I wanted to cover some of the issues addressed in the book on the cover rather than just create good looking surface imagery. The way I went about doing this was through using two double meanings in the front and back, the leather jacket and the knife, and the jumper and a broken chain-link fence.