Graphic Design

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop

Side Project: Redesigning William Golding’s Lord of the Flies Book Cover

Goal: I set out to create a design that was jam-packed with references to iconic motifs and scenes from Lord of the Flies.

I kept the color scheme consistent with common renditions of the book—red for violence and green for the jungle are just too good to let go of. The design is purposefully chaotic and hectic: the basic layout modernizes layouts of vintage book covers (specifically evoked through the fonts, borders, and patterns), but I layered a cacophony of images on top to mimic the arc of the book, which progresses from the “civilized” society of the time to sheer madness.

Some of my favorite little Easter Eggs are 1) the ship and island divided across the bottom two green panels, an allusion to the end of the book that just doesn’t seem to come soon enough, and 2) the representation of “the beast". For the ladder, I used Photoshop to collage multiple vintage photos of English schoolboys and hand-drawn sketches, to bring to life the beast that emerges from the hive mentality of the boys on the island.

Conclusion: This was a fun project that exercised my creative thinking and, honestly, my recall of ?high school? English class. If I were to do this again, I’d challenge myself to boil down these images to their sheer essence to create a more minimal design. While I succeeded in creating a cacophony, my design aesthetic has shifted since I created this, and I’d love to re-do this with a more simple spin.