Dana Li Experiments with Collage for Gentrifier
Dana Li is a graphic designer currently based in Brooklyn, designing book covers for Catapult / Counterpoint Press. Here she takes us through her process for designing Anne Elizabeth Moore’s memoir, Gentrifier.
Gentrifier begins with writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore granted a free house in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown” through a Detroit arts organization. The book is part memoir, part investigation, and details Moore’s residency in her new town as she grapples with the thorny ethics of owning property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood.
In my initial round of comps, I relied heavily on collage because in the book, the house is in various states of repair and must be built up, but it is also a slow uncovering of the constellation of the history and society that surrounds it. Through piecing together various imagery and experiences pulled from Moore’s memory and Detroit’s cultural history, it felt important to show Gentrifier is about more than just Moore and her free house, but also about Banglatown, the city of Detroit, and the interconnected web of messy, exploitative politics that seep into the relationships between them all.
An early draft of the final was chosen from that first round. The visuals on the selected cover were greatly inspired by the author’s own requests from the initial cover brief I received -- she had suggested a “realistic, perhaps photorealistic, house illustration, partially crumbled or previously burned, with illustrated plant life emerging from it.” I decided to construct the house itself with parts of many different houses in various conditions to further evoke a sense of reconstruction and change. I drew the plantlife with simple single color lines to keep it from visually conflicting with the photo-illustrated house. At this point, the team and author had a few requests: a change in background color, more hand-drawn flora, and, most importantly, to bring her sweet cat into the scene.
Here, I created a new round of comps experimenting with other bold background colors and type treatments. I offered an alternative handwritten title treatment to complement the illustrations, in addition to keeping the original sans serif option that paired well with the sharp edges of the house collage. The changes weren’t major, but they did the trick -- from this bunch a final was selected.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.