In case you haven’t already heard, our New Talent 2023 competition is open and accepting entries. This week, our latest submissions come from two students of Theron Moore, a professor of graphics design at California State University-Fullerton.
Our first entry is a book design from Elise Allison, a recent graduate who studied graphic and interactive design. This assignment tasked Allison with creating a collection of three book covers and jackets that work together in a manner that was visually cohesive. Since the chosen three books had to be linked by author, publication, and/or genre, Allison chose to design covers for the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire, also known as the “Game of Thrones Book Series” (above), which she is a big fan of. Her choice to limit her color palette to black, red, and off-white is striking and serves to compliment the brutal, bloody subject matter of the books. For the dust jackets, Allison creates different die-cut frames that complement the illustrations on each cover, which relate to each title in the series. For example, Allison interpreted the first book, A Game of Thrones, to be like a chess game, with the arched frame of the first book alluding to an incident where a character was pushed out of a window.
Our other entry is from Phu Dang, who was tasked with inventing a packaging system for a product line with various components, with the line containing at least three distinct pieces. Dang completed the assignment with this “Novilunium Card Set” (above), with “Novilunium” meaning “new moon” in Latin. This space-inspired name is the starting point for the galaxy-based package design, with each box featuring a die-cut of either a star, crescent moon, or planet. When arranged in a certain order, these designs “read as ‘the stars of the galaxy, the planet in the galaxy and its moon’ when it was arranged appropriately.” Different colors of gold leaf were also used, both to mimic the look of a nebula and to make each box unique with its own identifying color and pattern.
To learn more about how you can enter our 2023 New Talent competition, click here.