Book cover redesign for Diary of a Young Naturalist Part of the Penguin Cover Design Awards 2022
For this book cover redesign, I wanted to convey the sense of freedom Dara mentions feeling from being around nature. With powerful mentions of Dara’s mental health struggles, I opted for using yellow as the primary colour for the work, as it is vastly associated with children’s’ mental health programmes. Yellow also symbolises positivity, happiness, and optimism, while stimulating reinvigoration and integration, all concepts important to the story told by the teenager.
To create the Augmented Reality filter, I employing the structure behind the production of gifs (image sequences). I designed an animation of flying birds that represented the feeling of freedom of being surrounded by nature. The final touch was adding a recording I collected of birds chirping, to reinforce the sense of nature immersion. The filter brings birds to life when pointed at the cover of Diary of a Young Naturalist, either online or the paper printed version.