Penguin Design Award - Initial Thoughts

I have decided to tackle the Penguin Design Award brief as one of my final projects this year. The brief is to redesign the cover of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep for a new generation of readers, trying to avoid all the obvious clichés.

The obvious clichés that spring to mind are invariably shadowy figures, cigarette smoke, black and white photography and art deco typography. I will attempt to avoid all of those, or at least handle them in a different way. I am reading the book at the moment and the thing that strikes me is that it seems to be raining heavily the whole time. That's not something one usually associates with Los Angeles, so perhaps that has legs.

Another thing that I think could set my design apart is colour photography. I managed to find a few colour photos of LA from the right era (1930s, although I am sure a shot from the 40s would be okay too.

I found some much better colour images of LA but they are actually from the 1950s so I am not sure I could get away with them in this instance. Here they are anyway, so you can see why I like them so much:

I may well play around with these images a bit, for research purposes. However, I am not sure what the deal is regarding copyright. Are they old enough as to become copyright-free? I will have to look into this before putting to much work into a photographic solution.