Responsive Penguin: How to be a Woman Ideas

The next Penguin brief I opted to take on was "How to be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. This is of the non fiction genre, so I knew that this would be a bit more complicated to think about, as there isn't a whole narrative with characters generated already, as it is 'part memoire-part rant'. Meaning I would have to think of everything on the cover myself. I also thought this would be harder as I didn't want to go down the routes of stereotyping and drawing illustrations of connotations of women. I wanted to be new and inventive! 

This brief is a little but different to the others because it focuses on what I would say, 'charm'. It wants to be a cover that looks good, makes you smile and would look great in your home! One part that I did circle, was that the brief states that the cover must incorporate some part of 'popular culture'. And this is something I am going to highlight.

When brainstorming, I kept this idea in mind and expanded on it. I thought about what popular culture is to me, and what it centres around. And I think that this is social media! So I had this idea to make 'How to be a Woman' some sort of app/online guide, appearing on an iphone. Everyone knows about social media and mostly everyone has a phone so of course this relates! I also thought about the blurb and having speech bubbles as parts of the synopsis and others for reviews. 

However I didn't want to just jump into one idea, so I thought about some more. I thought about perhaps drawing the cover as if it was an instruction manual, again taking the title literally, but sort of going for a book inside of a book element. Another idea I had was to perhaps illustrate the author? The brief states that you can use an image of the author, but I thought why not make one of her myself? However this wouldn't have the 'comedy' element that the book is looking for, but I am still keeping it in mind.

So far I have much more ideas for 'How to be a Woman' than I do for 'A Clockwork Orange' and this was one of the briefs that I was worried about. However I am excited to tackle it and try and meet the brief to it's exact requirements!