503 Penguin 'A Brief History of Time' - Initial Ideas

I started my idea generation with a mind map of quick ideas. I looked at the content of the book, the different audience of the book, and other various associated ideas/themes/subjects. This initial idea stage was quite open-minded, and allowed me to quickly generate and sieve through ideas, some better than others.

To get a better understanding of the book's content and what it was trying to communicate, I took the book out of the library and read it. Doing this helped me to gain a better understanding of the book, its themes and the tone of voice that it has. I found that the tone of voice was quite serious. Although the author tried to explain the ideas within the book as easily as possible, some stuff was still quite difficult and challenging to understand. For this reason, I knew that the book will only have a somewhat specific audience/people who will go back to it and re-read it.

Having a better understanding of the book, I refined my initial ideas and made more detailed drawings. I tried to focus my idea generation around themes/ideas that are more obscure, and may not have be done before. One of the brief requirements asked for fresh and original design, so this was something I really wanted to create.
These drawings looked at the design of the book cover through several different perspectives, and explored different audiences for the book, as well as made some initial design considerations such as colour, layout and composition.