Christopher John Mullin is a British journalist, author and Labour politician. As a journalist in the 1980s, Chris Mullin led a campaign that resulted in the release of the Birmingham Six, victims of a miscarriage of justice.

Error of Judgment by Chris Mullin lit a fire under the establishment when it was first published. Shattering the prosecution’s case against six Irishmen charged with the Birmingham Bombings and going on to change the course of British legal history.

Designing Error of Judgement


We were commissioned to redesign the cover for this classic text. The brief was to appeal to a new set of readers. Here are some previous editions with different covers:

an earlier cover to a previous edition
Previous editions with different covers. Images of the Birmingham Six shown are from their police photgraphs after their arrest
an earlier cover to a previous edition
an earlier cover to a previous edition
This image shows the author Chris Mullin with the Birmingham Six after their acquittal.

Our original intent was to create a 1970’s red top type of newspaper cover with a bomb image constructed to look as if was made in that era:

Examples of Newspaper front pages
of the 1970s

Mutually it was decided to simplify the design into a cleaner typographic cover. We formulated an approach that didn’t show the accused ‘Six’ but to illustrate the bombing symbolically. We created diffrerentimages of an IRA bomb. The main problem with the early designs was the amount of information that we had to include on the first proposals. Five separate parts plus the image.

First design proposal
Designs showing the large volume of front cover copy
This design attempts to typographically distinguish the information
Inegrating the home made bomb into the book title

After pinpointing that the number of words to be included was making the cover look too cluttered. A new set of cover copy was produced, which made it easier to work with, mainly losing the ’50 Years after the Birmingham Bombings’, which was taking up a large amount of the cover’s real estate. We were able to make more of the Sebastian Faulks quote.
This placed the book on Amazon and on the bookshelf in a better way.

The final cover design, before some small adjustments to the text.

Making the bomb image abstract drew less focus and allowed the type to be clearer. Also, separating the image from the text by having a panel for each part, type in one colourway and the information in red.