Work/Editorial Design
Noughts & Crosses
Book cover and editorial system exploring racial division and social inequality through high-contrast symbolism.
- Designer
- Archie Durrant
- Role
- Editorial & Art Direction
- Year
- 2024
- Institution
- AUB
The Brief
A conceptual editorial brief to design a new book cover for Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses. I aimed to visually explore the novel’s complex themes of racial division and social inequality without relying on literal illustration.
My Approach
I avoided literal illustration and worked with high-contrast symbolism instead. The overlapping lipstick marks stand in for the romance and the social division at the centre of the book. Subtle textures such as fingerprints and faint stains sit around stark typography to hint at the human cost behind the political conflict.
The cover uses crosses and noughts in black and white to hold both the violence in the novel and the relationships between characters. White space gives the design room to breathe. African-inspired visual references help place the alternate-history setting, where the Aprican Empire colonised Europe 700 years earlier, and keep the cover tied to Blackman’s ideas about class and inequality.
I mixed rough and clean type so the cover could hold conflicting moods without explaining them outright. The restrained palette and symbolic imagery do most of the work.
Conceptual student project. Not an official commission for the publisher or author.