This project saw me design and illustrate a book cover for Tell Tale Heart: Gothic YA, a horror anthology novel targeting young adults. The illustration style comprises rough, tremoring line work, etching, and textured stippling, married with a pulp comic simplicity, all of which work in unison to contribute to an edgy, gritty and morbid aesthetic to engage the young adult target audience.
I produced a variety of grim illustrations for this book cover, of which the most prominent is a deformed, screaming face, with the crown of the head malformed into a heart. This idea was an interpretation of an actual “tell-tale heart”, based upon the poem which the book shares its name with. This grotesquery is accompanied by illustrations of torn-out eyeballs, a skeleton’s hand and a raven on a skull. The typography is based on gothic aesthetics, utilising tall, bold and imposing letterforms with sharp, fang-like serifs.
In addition, I designed the cover to be reversible with two different colour schemes; they are grim and visually heavy, evoking themes of desolation and suffering to speak to the gothic subject matter.
