Ben Prior on Designing Sebastian Fitzek's The Package
Ben Prior is a graphic designer at Head of Zeus. Here he tells us about his process for designing Sebastian Fitzek’s The Package.
The idea of designing a cover for a book titled The Package, to look like an actual package is far from an original one. It sounds simple but the design and approval process for The Package was quite long and involved lots of tweaking and refinements. Head of Zeus have acquired five of Sebastian Fitzek's books; The Package, Passenger 23, Seat 7A, The Soul Breaker and Amok. The Package being the first to publish, meaning it was incredibly important to position the cover and establish the author branding well so it could be rolled out across all the five covers. So although this article is about The Package cover specifically, there was a lot of consideration to the other four covers in how this one would look. Fitzek is incredibly successful in Germany and been translated into more that 36 different languages which meant that one of the key aspects that was needed was strong, recognisable author type.
The Package is an intense, twisty psychological thriller. The book follows Emma, a surviving victim of a known killer in Berlin that goes by the name of ‘The Hairdresser’. Sometime later she takes in a package for a neighbour which spirals Emma into further anxiety, bringing on the many surprising and horrible twists that allude to the craziness of Emma’s experiences, childhood trauma and mental state. I read the book once it was printed a few weeks ago and due to the suspense, lots of second (even triple) guessing and short chapters that bounce back and forth in time it made for a quick read.
I wasn’t originally briefed to design the cover for The Package, but was involved in all the conversations on how to position and brand Fitzek to look, and be, as much as a phenomenon as he is in Germany. As The Package had been published into many different languages before, there was a wealth of covers that were very useful to look at and to help establish how we may want our cover to look.
Left to right: German, French (PB+HB), Spanish and Dutch editions.
The brief for the cover was short and simple: to look like a realistic package and for the title type to bring in the thriller element. It was clear from the start that we didn't want the overly grungy/dirty looking cardboard texture and wanted to stay clear of drips and splats of blood that would somehow make our visualisation of a slightly more sophisticated and cleaner thriller look seem more of a gimmick.
The first round of visuals were designed by Tony Lyons, which set the ball rolling for The Package. They started with a more clean graphic look while the label was jagged and ripped. Looking back at this first visual now about a year later, I really like how the author, title and additional type are all within the label, giving the cover a compact and solid feel. The feedback from our acquiring editor and CEO, Nicholas Cheetham, was to bring Fitzek’s name out of the label so it could be positioned consistently on the rest of his books. We wanted to bring in more paper/cardboard package texture and details. Several tweaks later, we had the first approved cover which was fed out online while we continued to work on the other covers we needed for the Fitzek collection.
Several months had passed and it was only when we were working on the rest of the Fitzek covers that as a team, our Art Director Jessie Price, Nicholas Cheetham and I, decided to go back and see if we could improve on what we already had. Due to Coronavirus, the publication date was knocked back three months which allowed us to really scrutinise Fitzek's look and refine each of the four covers we had in-house. While all the bookshops were shut, our usual print program was paused briefly which enabled me extra time to work on The Package.
The first thing to re-work was the author type. Perhaps this is just me, but I feel the name Fitzek is somehow suited to the psychological thriller genre he writes in: it’s distinctive, sharp sounding and strong. We spoke about even omitting Sebastian completely and just going with Fitzek - like Murakami or Bateman, yet this may have been quite a bold move for a newly introduced author to the UK. I must have presented about 15 different variations on the Fitzek type in-situ on the covers and I have included 6 below. When designing these I pushed for ‘Fitzek’ being the dominant word and for ‘Sebastian’ to be smaller, tucked into the type lock-up. To push this logotype on from looking like a standard sans-serif, I tweaked the K to giving it a sharp intersecting point and edited the spacing between the T and Z with a diagonal cut. Originally, I was fond of the top middle, although between the team we couldn’t decide if this was legible enough - which probably meant it wasn't. After a lot of options we settled on the bottom right, not worlds apart from what we had already but with a slight shapely, colder feel to it.
Here is a line-up of the work in progress covers at the time (Seat 7A designed by Tony Lyons). I created an alternative version of the author logotype that would work better on the spine, which I liked the look of when they started to stack up next to each other.
Once we were happy with the author type, we wanted to try a more photographic approach to the label details and texture. The more I got involved with the varying graphic symbols and materials of packages, I eventually started to judge which ones were better, clearer – or more visually pleasing than another. Even before I got involved with this cover I knew of this Instagram page called the @kerbside_collection which is dedicated to unique and interesting graphic details found on printed packaging. I found the more I paid attention to these printed, insignificant details, the more interesting they became. The effect created with the texture of the cardboard, the cheap printing and simple diagrams are all appreciated as pieces of design, which were designed with practicality, function and purposefulness over visual aesthetics. The random arrows, additional barcodes and to us, the meaningless codes, were all elements I wanted to include on the cover.
I photographed lots of textures, symbols, tears, labels and rips from packages I received at home to give me a bank of images to work with. I personally found this side of the design process the most enjoyable, paying close attention to the graphic language and printed symbols on packages. Then, by reconstructing selected parts of these images together, I built a cover which resembled a true, real-life package you may receive through the post. On the previous visuals, Tony had included some clever ideas such as listing the book dimensions, barcode, Germany’s country code DE and thriller category so I kept these aspects in. We added a scannable QR code that links to headofzeus.com and brings up a trailer video created for book. Generally, I think QR codes are a faff, but in light of the current pandemic, people have become a lot more aware of how to quickly use them. Even if no one scans it, it just adds another layer of information and interaction to the cover. I added non-essential arrows, tape, warning icons and printed guides along with the actual barcode sitting on a slightly peeled back sticker, all appropriately coated with double hit spot UV. I decided to use tightly tracked Helvetica Bold in sentence case for the type to replicate the standardisation of printed labels.
Once the cover was fully approved, we costed for a few options on how to make this book feel as close to a package as possible. The desired finishes and specials - paying no attention to cost of production - would have been flush cut 3mm boards, squared binding, with an actual printed label sticker, which would have been applied to each of the books. Naturally, every copy would have had a bit of movement in the production process when each sticker was applied, making each one unique and imperfect. This would have made a really nice marketing/sales point too. Unfortunately, due to the costs we had to settle on printed, natural uncoated boards with double hit spot UV on the package label which is an effective compromise.
From the European editions, I feel Head of Zeus’ cover is cleaner and doesn’t have that immediate, explicit in-your-face! thriller aspect that a lot of this genre has. The first four Fitzek covers are all quite clean and light in colour, they don’t scream out thriller but have underlying clues and a certain coldness to them. I’m really pleased with the finished design and looking forward to working on the next four!
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.