Caroline Teagle Johnson on Designing Josh Malerman's Daphne
Caroline Teagle Johnson is an Art Director and Designer with over a decade of experience. Here she takes us through her process for designing a wicked cover for Josh Malerman’s Daphne.
Scott Biel at Del Rey was the Art Director for this book, and he asked me to work on it knowing that I'm a huge fan of horror movies. Actually, "huge fan" might be underselling it. Horror movies are my life blood and my obsession, not just during the Halloween season but all year round! Josh Malerman's excellent novel nods to the supernatural-leaning slasher franchises of the '80s (think Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street) while also offering a wholly fresh and original take on the genre. For one thing, the killer is a woman: a truly hulking she-devil called (you guessed it) Daphne.
The female image is not often depicted as looming and menacing, but we needed her to be both of those things here. I knew I was the right person for this job because my love of both graphic design and horror coalesced in the video stores of my youth. When I sat down to design, I channeled all my childhood hours scanning VHS box covers and thinking about how the best ones were able to distill the mood of a film into a single frightening and beautiful image. Sometimes the covers were much better than the movies they were created to represent! Luckily that couldn't be the case here, Daphne needed a striking cover deserving of the rich and evocative story inside her pages.
As far as the choice of typography goes, Scott’s suggestion was to work with fonts that signaled ‘70s and ’80s heavy metal music. Without revealing too much about the book, this was a considered detail that speaks to the character of Daphne herself.
I don’t have a lot to reveal about why the other design outtakes didn’t work. This was a case where the author immediately felt strongly about the cover that was ultimately approved and advocated for it despite some reservations on the part of sales and marketing regarding the main character’s “face” (or black void where her face should be) being featured so prominently. The image is a composite photo illustration that I created using parts of a few different stock images. The lighting effects and atmosphere that I applied using Photoshop brushes and blending modes really helped all the parts come together seamlessly in addition to lending a cinematic feel. In fact, I sincerely hope that someone options this book for a screen adaptation. We need Daphne in theaters next October! @Shudder, are you seeing this? You can hire me to design the poster!
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.