Okay, so as a student I have opportunities to enter competitions ran by some big names in the industry. One of these names is Penguin publishing who annually hosts the Student Design Award.
This competition is an opportunity for Art and Design students across the UK to gain an insight into design work in the publishing industry. The brief given is to design a new book cover for one of the three books offered. The choices are from three categories; Adult Fiction, Adult Non-Fiction and Children's Covers. The winner of this competition will get a placement with the publishing house, which is an amazing opportunity, but even the runner-ups get access to industry level feedback on their work. The competition itself is a great opportunity to explore this sector of the design industry.
For my entry I explored the Children’s Cover category and designed a book cover for Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry book Talking Turkeys.
Now I will be honest, I had no clue what this book was and how I would design a cover for it. After some background research and admiring the amazingly comedic poems written in the book, I was still as unsure as I was going into this. its a collection of short poems varying different themes and subject matters. I decided the best way to go about this was to take the title literally and make a cover design solely based on turkeys. So I spent an entire project exploring the bird and the poem Talking Turkey's, which is a great read on its own. I unfortunately didn't win any prizes for this project, but the experience of a professional brief was excellent and I would gladly enter the competition again if I had the chance!
