The Ask
Create a Book Jacket design for The Shining by Stephen King.
The Concept
I tried a couple different iterations of this cover, featuring the hotel, mountains, beer bottles, hedges, and an axe. In the end I wanted to reference without directly showing it. Since the book is set in the 1970’s, I chose a retro hotel key tag as to represent the old hotel.
The colours were chosen to resemble an old world elegance - since the hotel was once a magnificent place, I feel it would have featured lots of red velvet or burgundy colours, decorated with gold details.
The room number 217 is lightly embossed in the middle. The room 217 was the room featured in the book, so I wanted to draw viewers in with this number, make them wonder why that number. Its embossed to as to not distract from the title and author.
I chose the typefaces to suit what a key like this would look like, especially the American Typewriter style typeface.