"The Atrocity Exhibition" | JG Ballard | Illustration and cover

This is a self-initiated project to design the cover for "The Atrocity Exhibition" by J. G. Ballard.

I designed the illustration and set out the typography and layout for this.

Without giving away too much of the story, I wanted to highlight the obsessiveness of the main character with violent American imagery, particularly auto vehicle accidents and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While these are only some of the themes of the overall story, they kept coming back to me.

The challenge was to hint at these without using any obvious and well-worn literal images, like an actual car crash or the Zapruder Film for example, yet still have something to say about the event, and the themes in the book.

The image of the eye as part of the limousine wheel, and the finger about to touch the pupil is (I think) a reaction to how these events are extraordinarily personal and visual, yet become part of a collective machine, body and psyche about America.

That was the post-rationalisation anyway :) The image popped into my head as I was playing around with the pictures and felt like it touched something about the what the book has to say.