The One Hour Shakespeare Challenge

Last week I gave a talk and held a brief workshop for high school students as part of SVA'a Pre-College Summer Program. The assignment was to design a book cover for one of Shakespeare's plays. They were each given a title, two random images and a typeface. They had one hour to familiarize themselves with the play and design the cover. The idea was to have them make connections between disparate imagery and concepts and to let them play with type and image in an intuitive way. Given the extreme time constraints I thought they did a terrific job. Did I mention they were HIGH SCHOOL students? Here are a few:

I think these work equally well as covers and as posters. Most of the source imagery was culled from the Eric Baker's posts and emails.