Penguin Design Award - Existing Covers

The next logical step in my research was to look at some of the previous covers for The Big Sleep. Here are some of the most interesting ones I found, in no particular order.

This person was obviously answering the brief "do a cover in the style of Saul Bass". I do like it though, probably because I have always like Saul's work. I saw this in Mr B's in Bath, along with a few others in the series:

So I won't go for the Saul Bass look with my design. I do however think that a boldly-coloured graphic style could work really well. Moving on...

I quite like the look of this one. It's very simple and graphic but I am not sure that it would really jump out at you from a crowded bookshelf. Speaking of which, I must take Teresa Monachino's advice and take my mockups into Mr B's to photograph them in situ. That's a while off yet though.

This is pretty nice - it looks contemporary while using photography from the era. It could be perceived as a bit of a cliché though. Maybe I could take a crime scene image from LA in the 90s, like from the gang violence in Compton? That would certainly bring it up-to-date. It wouldn't really reflect the content of the book though.

I'm not really sure what that one is getting at - the red and blue of police lights? The flag of the US?. It doesn't even look particularly interesting.

This one looks quite classy but the typography isn't very nice and the image of a guy lighting a fag is too predictable. Nice crop on the photo though.

Below are a few others I picked out but don't really have anything to say about.

So, there are a whole bunch of ideas that I will try to avoid completely. I think my next step will be to look at modern crime fiction covers to see if I can identify any trends or designs that seem to work especially well in the genre.