Motifs In The Colour Purple

The Color Purple’s (1982) first edition published by Harcourt is an unattractive portrayal of the novel’s central themes. Despite the novel’s central, symbolic motif being the colour purple; the colour is only incorporated in the cover’s text, through the typography and typeface. This is arguably not emphasised enough when taking into consideration the significance of the colour within the novel. Whereas, in my redesign using the InDesign program, I used the colour purple almost exclusively. This is due to the critical negatives I observed in the original cover’s first edition. Although it can be argued that red and blue have an equally significant role within the novel’s context, an uniformed audience would be unconscious to the reasoning behind this stylistic choice.

Whilst purple is important motif in the novel, the theme of race is equally explored by author and activist, Alice Walker. In the novel’s inception, the protagonist chops cotton in a field, yet later in the novel she yearns to wear fine white cotton clothing. In light of this, I found that incorporating a field of cotton in the cover was vital. The appearance of a cotton field, would exhibit clearly, the novel’s main themes by using the historical connotations attached with the imagery whilst also being a nod to the novel’s content and themes. In Book Design by Andrew Halsam, Halsam stresses that the cover of a book ‘is a promise made by a publisher on behalf of an author to a reader’, this is a critical perspective which I took into consideration in the production of my cover (Halsam,