Penguin - Altered cover design

A black background is more impactful and appropriate to the novels narrative. The white typography sets a high contrast against the deep black background and its simple colour scheme allows the design to stand out on the bookshelves. The background colour relates to the mystery of the non-fiction crime novel and sets an ominous tone for the reader.

Template Gothic replaces the Akzidenz Grotesk used in the design above. The template is left unchanged because its layout is specific in its design to achieve a sense of informational hierarchy and proportionality. The layout has been considered and is flexible enough to work with Template Gothic.

Template Gothic's ability to achieve an unnerving atmosphere is due to its unorthodox design as a typeface. It's thin but varied stem width makes the typeface look sharp and piercing and its off-centered and large counters make the letterforms look hollow and eerie. A mixture of Regular and Bold fonts are also used to better communicate the typeface's unorthodox look and better achieve an mysterious atmosphere. As a whole, Template Gothic's unusual type design is its biggest strength and is aimed to standout from the plethora of book covers that use common typefaces, i.e Helvetica Condensed.

'Cold' is only outlined due to the word it represents. Cold infers a lack of emotion or feeling hence the lack of fill. This also breaks the monotony of having all of the copy in the same fill and typeface. A visual hierarchy is created that prevents the cover design from looking flat.

Changing the book's captions to the Penguin orange communicates their brand's identifier more explicitly to the reader, making it clear that it is a Penguin book. The orange copy sits lower on the visual hierarchy as the contrast is lower than the white on black used on the cover. Therefore the reader will naturally reader the title and author of the book first, and then the captions.

The weak link the design is the addition of the sailfish motif. Given its positioning on the back cover page, the sailfish becomes an after thought and feels put on for the sake of it because of its little relation to the art direction of the rest of the cover. A final decision needs to be made to whether include the sailfish or not.