Wonder

This project was part of the Penguin Book competition of 2019 Student Design Award for Children’s Covers hosted by Penguin Random House UK. I had chosen to redesign the cover of the book ‘Wonder’ as this was one of my personal favourites to read. The story of Wonder is based on the life of ‘August (Auggie) Pullman’. A 10 year old boy born with a rare facial abnormality is set to start a new school and wants nothing more than to be treated as a normal kid but, his new classmates can’t seem to get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. The astronaut helmet in this story represented Auggie’s desire to hide himself from the world and create a safe space for himself, with the help of his imagination and interest in science and outer space.

The original cover of the book was a visual interpretation based on the facial deformities of Auggie Pullman as per the story, I had initially developed the original idea of the face in the beginning but rather than going along with the theme already used, I then decided to focus on the personality of the character Auggie and his aspirations. A requirement of the guideline was that the tagline ‘You can’t blend in when you were born to stand out’ was included in the front cover, for me the placement of the tagline was the hardest part as when I was somewhat satisfied with the layout of my draft design, the tagline just wouldn’t fit in and looked out of place, this required a lot of redesigns and edits to come together. 

The final design I went with was the cover illustrating Auggie in an astronaut suit stepping into space, symbolising that the world is his oyster. I had incorporated the tagline into his oxygen system which also had a hidden meaning of being his supply of confidence, feeding through the text and connecting Auggie with the universe. Along with being very different from the other book covers I had drafted for this project, this particular cover had all those elements of Auggie’s imaginations and ability to achieve something more than he was getting from the world.

This was a great experience as it enabled me to become comfortable with book cover guidelines, bleeds, margins etc. I enjoyed redesigning these covers and delving deeper into the context of the book by using my own creations to express the story in an illustration.