The Pitch

My pitch came out pretty well, I showed a design that I drew in my sketchbook and got some feedback on it on how I could change it to make it better.

I started by showing a slide of bullet points for the main themes from the book that I should take into consideration when doing my design for the book's cover. I have talked about these themes in more depth in a previous blog entry but I just narrowed it down to the main ones I want to feature in my design for the book to keep it simple.

 I then showed them the mood board I drew up for existing book covers for The Big Sleep, and talked about which ones I liked  the most and why and if there were any elements from those that I would like to incorporate into my own design.

I then showed them a page about René Gruau which was the main artist that inspired my ideas for the cover and talked about the 3 themes I want to take from his artwork and feature strongly in my own design. Those themes were Legs, Femme Fatale and Elegance.

Moving on I showed them the sketches that I have done based on or inspired by René Gruau's work which I have also done a previous blog entry about. and talking about how I've changed some of them to look more original and where I could use them on the book cover.

I then showed some typography I was looking at and talked about which one I'm likely to use.
I quite like the Smoke Rasterized font as it has that fade/ gradient towards the top, Smoke screen is basically the same font as smoke rasterized except much heavier and bolder. I will probably go for the Blockhead font as it looks the most similar to the hand drawn font I did on my design, If it doesn't work I'll hand draw the font or maybe use blockhead and hand draw specific letters to make it look more similar to my hand drawn font. For the blurb and any other text I want to use a typewriter or maybe handwritten kind of font.
I then talked about my chosen colour scheme which is just black, white, blood red and grey.

 It turned out that on my design I have made the spine too thick, and that the design I did for the spine wouldn't work for the actual book cover as the spine was too thin and wouldn't fit my design of Vivian with the bloody orchid on it. I'm thinking about removing Vivian and the orchid completely, and just having the blood drop that comes from the bottom of the orchid and putting it at the top of the spine, and rearranging the layout of the text.
Someone also mentioned that on the front cover the pillows that the woman is holding looks like a newspaper, I thought that her holding a news paper would fit a lot better than pillows so I'm going to try and make them look more like a newspaper when I re-design this. I've also thought about removing the revolver because I thought it was too cliche and that the cigarette ash tray and the little Polaroid photos were enough.
For the blurb I was suggesting changing Marlowe's suit to brown and the background to red and everyone seemed to agree with this idea more than the one shown with the red suit and white background. They also suggested to change the smoke to white instead of blueish- gray as it would look better on the red background.