Lateral Thinking Book Cover Redesign
Lateral Thinking is a self help book written by Edward de Bono that talks about how to be more creative and productive. In this book, de Bono has tried to make it clear that creativity is not a latent talent, but a skill and has also listed down very simple steps to use this skill voluntarily so that one can come up with new ideas at any time, instead of sitting and waiting for an idea to happen. ‘Suspension of Judgement’ and ‘Search for Alternate Paths’, were two of the methods described in the book, which stuck with me. The initial idea that came to my mind when I thought about alternate paths was the grid maze, we used to solve as children. So, I drew the maze puzzle in the shape of a brain and then added a pencil drawing a path around the maze, hence solving it in an unconventional way.
I did not like the current cover design for Lateral Thinking or any of its previous issues. I felt the illustration was too derivative and cliché. The first thing I wanted to remove from the cover was the bulb, since it has become very common these days for representing everything to do with the mind. The only thing I liked about the cover was how the keyhole was placed inside the author’s name. My aim for this cover was to illustrate something that conveyed the same message but was not that obvious.
I chose chrome yellow as the background colour and made 2 layout iterations using the same illustration but I did not choose the second one because it looked more like a children’s book, while this book is quite a serious read. Moreover, the placement of the text created visual interest but it affected the hierarchy.
The font used for the cover design is Bohemian Typewriter.
