Authors Choice: Because the story is dark I wanted to use a blood red and my original piece had a black background. I changed the color outline, added a faint detail to the background, and gave the letters a blood red spray. If you look closely the arrows still point up and down, this represents the famous line “To be or not to be”. The lower half represents death, “Not to be”
Handmade: The Ghost of Hamlet's Father. My favorite detail in this draft is the faint skull in the background symbolizing that much more death is coming in the rest of the story.
Typography: Its rare for an artist to use fingerpaints in a typographic art piece. However, I feel that this helped capture the dark theme surrounding Hamlet. If you've read the story you know how violent it is. The background blood stained paper helps capture the age and time period of this story.
For this assignment I was asked to recreate a cover for one of the most influential books of all time. With this assignment we should do our own original concept in a newly designed focus. When creating these three covers we were asked to do one of them using only typography, one made by hand, and a third in any way we feel best represents the story. After developing many concepts, these are my final covers that I felt best represent the story of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
