For Whom The Bell Tolls: Book Jacket

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a war novel by Ernest Hemingway, of which I was tasked with designed a book jacket for.

The solution I came to was to utilize a rustic, charcoal texture with minimal, inconsistent lighting to reflect the dimness of wartime that the setting to the book lies in, with further homage put in via the silhouette of the biplane carefully placed on the back.

The title of the novel actually derives from a poem by John Donne, and so I decided to use this as an eerie throwback to the inspiration of the title itself since that is the centerpiece of the novel. The stanzas are screened back and blurred, disguised into the texture.

The typography is exclusively small caps or exclusively lowercase to help aid the environment that is being conveyed just through the textural qualities of the cover alone. Using sentence case commanded too much attention to the reading as opposed to the aesthetics and didn’t equally evoke the tumultuousness that is being conveyed. That being said, the white color was an intentional decision to accompany the old style typeface in balancing out rusticity with brightness.