AGATHA CHRISTIE Absent in the Spring

Agatha Christie 
Absent in the Spring We have been given a one day brief to design a cover for our given Agatha Christie novel. Mine being 'Absent in the Spring'. The book was published in august 1944. The book is about a woman named Joan Scudamore as she is stuck between train rides on her way back to London from visiting Bagdad. With nothing t

o do she lets her mind wander and reflects on uncomfortable truths about her life. As the book's title of the book is taken from Shakespeare's sonnet 98 'From you have I been absent in the spring'. I wanted to include an aspect of spring into my designs. I felt looking at typically spring flowers would create a recognisable and interesting cover for a book.   



















I began by creating these black pen drawings of the flowers, I wanted my drawings to be clear and recognising, I wanted my drawings to work graphically. I tried to keep each line totally joined as this would make it a lot easier in photoshop to colourise my images.

I began to look at the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his plant and animal drawings his beautiful attention to detail and fluent and free brush strokes create amazingly accurate and ornate drawings. The use of colour throughout Hokusai's work really makes the images feel real yet use simple flat colour. 

I coloured my images according to the images though I used a much more muted and pastel colour set this made for more intimate and soft images that I felt reflected the older target mark of people that read Agatha Christie novels. I really enjoyed creating these images and put a lot of consideration into colour combinations and really tried to get a feel for what colours seem to work well together.

After creating these plant images I began to see how the images looked with a title. At first I wanted to use very similar colour schemes with the text and the images, initially these designs seemed to reflect the book well yet I thought the title was unclear and I bit hard to read and over complicated. The colours seemed to alike and became a bit harsh on the eyes. 









I used a more simplistic and san serif typography as the designs became much more clear and easy to read form a far. 

These designs were much more legible and I liked the cream boarder as it allowed the designs to be much more simplistic. However the with the large text box I found it difficult to compose on the page that best complimented the illustrations.







These are my three final designs.
I experimented with the text at the top as I wanted the title to be as readable and simple ad possible thus getting the name of the book across straight away rather that something unclear and over complex. I am really pleased with how the designs came out, given the short amount of time I felt I created a well informed and interesting design. 

I have sent in my designs to the Guardian website and managed to have my designs feature on their website as shown.