Freelancer February: Alissa Dinallo on Designing Small Joys of Real Life
Alissa Dinallo is an award-winning Sydney-based designer who specialises in books and book covers. She has worked in-house at Allen & Unwin and Penguin Random House before starting her own studio, which she currently runs out of Marlborough House in Surry Hills. Here she takes us through her process for designing the beautiful, fresh cover for Small Joys of Real Life.
The process of designing this cover was relatively straight forward. Originally titled In Real Life, this beautiful debut novel centers around a young woman living in Melbourne, Australia, who falls pregnant after a one night stand. At first we explored some photographic options, which were beautiful, but not quite right for the book.
The publisher decided we should try something poignant and illustrative (a la Sally Rooney) so we explored some simplistic illustrations of the main character riding her bike. This quickly became a favorite direction. I refined the illustration to its most simplistic form, and played around with varying contrasting colour palettes.
We landed on the pink, green, black and cream, which really compliments the contemporary millennial style of Allee’s writing. We also kept the typography simple, using a modern serif instead of a san-serif.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.