Student Work: Dust Jacket Redesign, Peter Pekaski and Gabriela Ramirez

I'm teaching Book & Magazine Design this semester, and had to share some terrific dust jackets by my students.

The assignment was to do an "observe and report" on a bookstore, and come back with two sketches of book covers they found in their bookstore—ones that caught their attention. Once back in class, they chose one of the covers to redesign. Then...to expand that cover into a full dust jacket complete with back cover, spine, and flaps.

Peter Pekalski chose to redesign Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Instead of relying on the hard-boiled/noir comic book image, he chose to go to an all-type solution, knocking the type out over an image of a face.

Here's the original, from the bookstore (designer?):

And here's Peter's redesign.

If you look closely (click on the image for a larger view), you can see that he also extended the face onto the flap, so you get a hint of an ear. He also played with the subtitle type, splitting it and repositioning it so it's no longer smooth—it's been manipulated. Click here to see more of Peter's work.

The redesign reminds me a bit of an inverse version of Jamie Keenan's terrific design for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Another student, Gabriela Ramirez, chose to redesign Jay Caspian Kang's The Dead Do Not Improve. The original cover was designed by Maria Elias. This is a terrific cover; obviously Gabriela had to do something different to make her redesign stand out.

Here's Gabriela's redesign (click image to see larger):

Working with the skull illustrations as Rorschach ink blots on the front, back and flaps, she manages to get the whole cover to work together, without getting into cliché. The mixture of hand-drawn lettering and the sans serif typeface Neuo also work great together. A great departure from the original, which was the point of the project.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from these students (and the others!) and sharing the results with you!