The Penguin Student Design Awards are hosted by Penguin each year, giving students the chance to design book covers for some of their most popular books. From 2021 to 2019, I designed covers for three of the entries, "The Uninhabitable Earth", “Norwegian Wood” and “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. I thoroughly enjoyed all three books. The authors have a beautiful and unique writing style which I tried to capture within the covers.

The Uninhabitable Earth, written by David Wallace-Wells was 1 of 3 books that we were given the opportunity to redesign as part of the Penguin Student Design Awards. The book discusses in great detail what catastrophic environmental impacts may happen if we continue to live in an unsustainable world.

I designed an underwater environment for the cover and then printed the cover onto a book. I finished it off by wrapping the book in a fishing net. Fishing nets take up 50% of the ocean’s plastic pollution, which is why I thought it would make for a fitting narrative. The impermanence of the fishing net (as you can easily take the net off the cover) suggests that it's not too late for readers to change their ways.

Norwegian Wood is the story of Toru Watanabe, a young man who is damaged by the suicide of his high school friend, Kizuki. Toru falls in love with Kizuki’s tortured girlfriend, Naoko, who is isolated in her own mind. When she goes into a mental hospital, he promises to wait for her. The brief was to design a cover that would visually connote the themes and tone of the book.

The book is built on themes such as depression, loneliness, love, and mental health. Many characters within the book are “broken” mentally, in one way or another. These characters' stories are beautifully devastating which is captured through the writing style of the talented Murakami. This cover design uses the metaphor of a dying flower to connote the beauty, love, and loneliness that is portrayed when journeying through the stories of characters such as Naoko. The broken glass element both connotes characters in the book who are “broken” mentally and links to a significant part of the book where Naoko drops a wine glass during a mental breakdown that leads to more devastating scenes.

By Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything is exactly what the book name suggests. This non-fiction novel is a science book with a comedic and widely accessible writing style. The author succeeds in interestingly explaining the history of “nearly everything” including space, time, the big bang, evolution, and everything in between. The brief was to design a cover that would visually connote the themes and writing style of this book.

Designing a cover for a book that talks about “nearly everything” is a lot more challenging than you think. How do you visually explain the history of everything on a single book cover? I cannot speak for everyone but this was my interpretation of this. The overall message Bryson consistently conveys is how little we humans know about the universe we live in, and how small and unimportant we are as humans, compared to the timeline of earth and the universe it lives within. The cover uses an evolution line of different species that have inhabited earth over the years. The most important thing about the evolution line is it falls off both edges of the cover, suggesting that we were not the first and we definitely won’t be the last to live on earth. Towards the right side of the line, the human in the line is seen taking a selfie with the rest of the line. This was to capture some of the dry humour that is used in the writing style.