Moby Dick Illustrated Cover

For the redesign of the cover for Herman Melville's book Moby Dick, I chose to present the novel with an illustrated, vintage nautical map look. As most of the previous and recent covers for the book have stuck to a modern, minimalistic style; I thought it would be a nice switch to bring in a classic look to the viewers. Seeing as the majority of the story takes place while the characters voyage across the ocean, a nautical map was a perfect fit. Taking inspirations from the sea serpents drawn on old maps from the pirate age, I decided to illustrate the character of Moby Dick like a sea monster; which, incidentally, fits with how Captain Ahab describes the white whale. Surrounding Moby Dick is three sinking ships, which account for the three encounters the captain and his crew have with the whale nearing the end of the story. All three of which, end with a single or multiple crew members dying by sea and the final encounter with the destruction of The Pequod and the death of the entire crew except for the narrator of the story. On the spine of the cover, I created the compass of the map with a harpoon tied up to a ship wheel. This was a reference to how the fate of the ship is directly tied to Captain Ahab's hunt for the whale. On the back of the cover, I just simply illustrated the silhouette of a boat, meant to be The Pequod, and a tornado, which is a reference to the storm the ship's crew sails through once they hit the equator during their voyage. The choice in colour for this cover, in order to create the map look I was going for, stuck to shades of browns; however, in order to catch the eye of the viewer and to further reference the illustrated maps, I through in splashes of blues, reds, and gold. Finally, to adhere to the needs of the publisher, their logo appears on both the back and the spine of the book. On the spine, the logo has been formatted to fit with the aesthetic of the book cover. On the back, however, their exact logo has been placed next to the bar code.