This is my love letter to Benjamin Zephaniah's collection Talking Turkeys.
I wanted my cover to really convey Zephaniah's creativity, his energy and most importantly his voice. That's why I did not add a turkey to my cover. Instead I focused on what a Christmas table could look like without this staple as advocated in the title poem. The additional objects reference many of the other poems in this fantastic collection.
SKETCHBOOK DEVELOPMENT WORK
Started with the typography as I knew pretty quickly the energy and fun I wanted it to have. The additional punctuation was inspired by Zephaniah's poem According To My Mood.
I then looked back at Talking Turkeys as an individual poem, since the collection is named after it. I wanted to communicate what the poem is about so I started out sketching a Christmas dinner table (minus the turkey). Worried it would brand the anthology as a Christmas collection, I reigned in the Christmas theme a little and added objects to reference the other poems.
When I had the initial sketches down, I started the composition using tracing paper to redraw them where I wanted them. I then used these traces to draw each element digitally.
Type Drawings
Initial Ideation
Initial Front Cover Design
Rough Sketches For Other Poems 1
Rough Sketches for Other Poems 2
Rough Sketches For Other Poems 3
Rough Sketches For Other Poems 4
Developed Front Cover Design
Full Rough Cover Design 1
