Class: Communication Design 1

Date: October 2012

Description: For this project, I had to design a dust jacket for a novel using different mediums.

I chose the book, The Outsiders written by S.E Hinton. I began my design process by creating a major theme that would be carried throughout the entire design. The Outsiders is written from a fourteen year old boy’s perspective, Ponyboy, who lives in a cruel world that only knows black from white&mdashand fails to see the beauty of the world. Ponyboy, on the other hand, has this childlike innocence and never fails to truly appreciate the beautiful things&mdashlike the sunset. I began the photo taking process by walking around the downtown Toronto area that I live in. I took photos of what I thought captured natural beauty or imagery that dominates in the movie that I strongly associate the book with&mdashsuch as the railroad tracks and Converse shoes. I also utilized some of the photos that I had already taken in my hometown, such as the cornfield and the different sunsets.

Instead of cutting out the images on Photoshop, I decided to print them out and cut them, then scan them on to the computer. When comparing the two, I found the scanned versions had a more authentic collage feeling to them. I also crumpled up and scanned the different pieces of lined paper.

Ponyboy grows up through the novel and technically loses his innocence, but always proceeds to ‘stay gold’ and see the beauty in the world. The collage of the different photos of the sunset, surrounded in black and white images represents that essence of true beauty and staying gold in a world that is so cruel and rigid.

The crumpled piece of paper, in which the sunset appears to be formed by, has the poem by Robert Frost, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’. This is truly symbolic, as Ponyboy spends the entire novel trying to really discover what it means. He finally understands when he reads a letter from his late friend, Johnny, explaining it to him. The other crumpled piece of paper on the back of the book, which continues on to the back flap, has the first and last sentence of the novel&mdashwhich is an iconic quote.