_Applying Abstraction: American Psycho
Class Project: FA/DESN 1001 - Communication Design Foundation
Instructors: Emery Norton, Sarvenaz Parish
Year: 2024
_The Brief
For our final project FA/DESN 1001 project, titled “Applying Abstraction”, we were prompted to redesign a book cover of our choosing.
We had to complete two different design solutions for the final submission: (1) a type-based cover and (2) an image-based cover. We could use any medium or technique to construct type and images, so long as we explored “abstraction”.
I chose “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis.
_V1: Image Based
I used an image I took at a downtown Toronto bus station, where a billboard image of a woman was vandalized with presumably white sharpie. I then edited the image on Photoshop, playing around with its values, lighting, and texture, to give it a gritty look. I chose this image because it directly alludes to the key theme of American Psycho, which is violence and murder, commonly inflicted upon women in the book. The use of red again ties together this theme with my design. The juxtaposition of the abstract marker lines and the structurual clarity of the typography and rectangular frames provides insight into the psyche of Bateman, given his OCD-like tendencies throughout his day-to-day endevours, which seem to entirely fall apart during his violent episodes.
_V2: Type Based
I took an image of various clothing “size” stickers beside a laundromat, and again, repeated a similar process in terms of editing the image to complement the tone of the book. The highlighted red stickers’ numbers, when added, equals to 40, which is the estimated murder count of Patrick Bateman. The fact that the stickers are from a laundromat alludes to how many of his victims are often of lower social classes, who often lacked luxury resources, such as the homeless, sex workers and working class individuals. The erratic arrangement of the stickers depicts how their deaths often occured very spontaneously and mirrors Bateman’s psychological instability. This is then juxtaposed alongside a clean typographic composition, representing Bateman’s clean cut corporate life as a broker on Wall Street.
Typeface: ABC Diatype by Dinamo Typefaces
Photography by me