Senior Book Jacket: A Senior Narrative Book Jacket by Sasha Sobol (2015)

I wrote a story about Sophia, a perfectionistic student who runs into unexpected trouble when an open-ended short story assignment in her English class provokes a tough case of writer's block.

The mise-en-scene on the front cover depicts a pair of hands tearing apart a brainstorming sheet in utter frustration. To show that my character is under a lot of pressure, I used a pile of ripped up pieces of paper as the background. I got this idea when I was stuck trying to come up with a narrative and, in a moment of high anxiety, destroyed a large stack of paper (that was not important to anyone). The color scheme of pink, turquoise, and white echoes the colors of the background photo to unifying the entire cover. If not for the background, I would have picked a color scheme more closely related to my own color preferences. I then picked fonts generally associated with children's tales to play up the pretentiousness of the word tale in the title. I also picked the font because it looks cool. The way the cover is organized shows the contrast between order (neat rectangular boxes) and disorder (the scraps of paper in the background and the tilted rectangles). This juxtaposition represents Sophia's difficulty with navigating creative writing without precise guidelines or rules.