There are great books, and also great covers. Word from the wise says to never judge a book by it’s cover, but as every reader knows, we often fall in love with a cover before we have ever read the book. And we have all secretly thought to ourselves, at least once – I could make a better cover for this book.
We want to give you the chance to make this dream come true, and to hold in your hands a book with a cover that you, personally, have designed.
Book covers are their own unique art form. They draw on a rich visual language full of meaning, imbuing and adorning the simple text of a book’s title with the possibilities that the story will bring you. A title might be just one word – but the book cover will let you imagine the whole world that it contains.
Some covers become must-haves for the way they adorn a bookshelf – consider the Penguin Black Classics. Some covers will tell you whether you’re going to take a trip into a passionate romance, or visit the deep abyss of space. But with the simple alchemy of fonts, colours and design, what every book cover will do is give the book a face. One that will catch your eye in a sea of options in a bookstore, make you reach out, and bring it home.
With the rise of ebooks, book cover designers became even more imaginative. On one hand, they ingeniously developed techniques for covers to stand out even in the size of a thumbnail; and on the other, they relished the opportunity to celebrate the physical book as an object of beauty.
With brighter colours and bolder fonts, the eye was held captive; and for those roaming the bookstores, beautiful new innovations came to life. The soft-touch cover, with its silky feel; a gold foil detail which would catch the light when you held it up; gilted edges, sometimes with inked illustrations like a secret to discover, and embossed designs to trace with a finger along the spine . Bookstores transformed into a gleaming repository of treasures, with the books calling out to you from their window-displays and curated tables.
Drawing on our exhibition celebrating the wide variety of international covers for French translations, we now want to bring you, the reader, into this celebration of books. We want you to bring your imagination, your interpretation of the story, and your ideas of beauty to these three iconic books, as we reimagine what a book cover can be!
Contest Concept
We want you to reimagine and redesign the cover of one or more selected titles. Your constraints will be the format itself – the design will encompass both the front and back cover along with the spine, with the necessary elements present as given below. But outside that, we want to see your interpretations of the story brought to life. You may draw on internationally iconic book-covers, indigenous motifs and colour palettes, or any other tradition that you believe best represents your understanding of the text.
Each participant may submit one unique entry per title, creating covers that capture both the spirit of the text, the culture behind it, and its connection to Indian readers.
Please read the blurbs for details regarding the content/category of book; and you are free to further research the books online:
Contact Information
For further questions or assistance, please contact us at [email protected]
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