Book Series Cover Design for Samuel Beckett's plays: 'Waiting for Godot', 'Happy Days', and 'Krapp's Last Tape'

With this project I began with thinking about what tied all of Beckett's plays together; among other things, the majority of his work explores language as a faulty vehicle of communication -- silences and pauses make frequent appearances as characters struggle to express their internal experiences with words, and Beckett himself called language 'irrelevant', a 'veil which one has to tear apart' and that has to be 'dissolved'. I thought this could be a fun idea to try and convert into cover design form, as it's quite abstract.

I took particular sections from each of the playscripts and covered up the dialogue with boxes, and added a dust/scratches filter onto the text to make it look like it was fading away. I only left stage directions which indicated that there should be a silence or pause of some kind. This was to embody Beckett's idea that language and words need to be covered up, done away with, made redundant.

I wanted to work with quite abstracted, simple shapes and colours to echo Beckett's sparse style. When researching him for this project I discovered that he was a self-proclaimed 'analyser' who '[tried] to leave out as much as [he]' could, and you can see this when you watch some of his plays (not much onstage production wise, minimal lighting, maximum four or five characters etc...)

I chose red and orange for the 'Happy Days' cover given the scorching heat causing the environment to decay in the play, blue for 'Waiting for Godot' since it's set over an evening that we don't see end, and a faded yellow for 'Krapp's Last Tape', as I felt this colour went well with the play's exploration of aging / loss of vitality as we age