Digital Graphics

Final Design
Penguin Book Cover

The pen is mightier than the sword; on the other hand they say an image can speak a thousand words. Bearing this in mind when given the brief to design a book cover for the Novel “A Hundred Years of Solitude” as well as reading up on the story I also checked out previous cover designs and images associated with the book. To my surprise I found that the ‘Lovers’ theme was used in the majority of past cover designs and seemed to be popular so I wanted to include this aspect in my design. However I also noted that the family tree of the Buendía family of which there are seven generations is very significant to the author.


As the designer I wanted to play on this significance so I decided to base my book cover around the concept of a family tree with the lovers entwined in the roots of the tree the same way they are entwined in the roots of the story. I re-worked ‘lovers’ several times before taking advice from a fellow student and blended the image with the multiply tool, so it looked like they had been carved into the tree. This fitted great with the family tree format and the way lovers carve their names into trees for future generations to see, especially as the story is a generational one. Another aspect of the story that I wanted to denote was the very beginning of the story where José Arcadio Buendía is standing in front of firing squad thinking back on how his life leads him to his current predicament.