This is a personal project in which I gave myself the task of designing a conceptual book cover for a biography on theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, also known as “the father of the atomic bomb.” I had done some research into book covers designed for historical biographies and honestly, they all were pretty similar to each other. Usually these covers consisted of a black and white photo of the subject with bold text, pretty minimal. With that in mind, I decided to go a bit unorthodox with designing this book cover for a biography.

With this design, I wanted to capture a half tone look, but printed on old paper. I also wanted to try and add different visual elements that pointed to different things about Oppenheimer as well as the title. For example, because the book is called Oppenheimer: Atomic God, I utilized a map of the bomb site documented from the Manhattan Project, in which it shows the blast radius through circles. In addition, I was able to use the largest circle on the map as a sort of “halo” for Oppenheimer, similar to what you would see in early Christianity art, which refers back to the title of the book.