frankenstein
book cover

brief

Design and illustrate a book cover from a book that you are currently reading.

Concept

As in the book, young Victor stitches together a monster from body parts. For my cover, I stepped into the protagonist's shoes and built my own monster … not from corpses, but from pork bought at Migros. Illustrating with meat turned out to be a strange, experimental process, leaving me equal parts queasy and in awe. Photographing the finished portrait, there were moments it genuinely felt like a living creature was lying in front of me. That's exactly the feeling the cover should give the viewer: a portrait unsettling enough to send a chill down their spine.
I experimented with different crops, but ultimately chose to show the full portrait — it's the most unsettling option, and to me, the most effective. I paired the illustration with a modern typeface to echo that contemporary approach: Alfarn Regular, a grotesque sans-serif born at the Bauhaus in Weimar, a movement famous for pushing experimental, modern art. That heritage links my contemporary illustration back to the values baked into the font itself.