David Litman on Designing Swimming Back to Trout River
David Litman is an award-winning graphic designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Here he takes us through his process for designing Swimming Back to Trout River.
Usually I’m drawn to single iconic objects rendered in an interesting or unexpected way to draw a reader in. This book spans time and continents and felt like so many things all at once; China’s Cultural Revolution, a young violist, a family separated, love and tragedy.
The author and editor agreed that the cover should somehow evoke the different narratives at play, while still feeling simple and beautiful. The author felt strongly that she wanted it to have a strong sense of time and place while not using cliche imagery to signal Chinese culture.
So, scribbled on my sketchbook page untidily read something like: distance and space, water, river, sea, birds no birds, China, Chinese culture, San Francisco, family, separation, letters, stamps?, violin, music, sheet music? Maybe birds?
My first attempts worked a lot with collage and were a mess. Just way too busy, too on the nose, trying to do too much. I spent a lot of time trying to get the type to read on these before abandoning them entirely. I’m glad I never shared them and will take them with me to my grave, but they were a vital course correction. It needed to be simplified; many things but one thing. The bamboo leaf felt evocative and could also be made up of various elements; sheet music, bits of letters, stamps from the period. When I took it into a jacket meeting it was mistaken for a pot leaf…so there was that.
The ‘many things as one thing’ didn’t feel like it was going to work, so I abandoned that for a while. Simply evoking the idea of distance and space and the sea seemed like it could be enough, and could play off the title well. Water is a strong thematic image in the novel. I rather like the Rothko inspired cover with it’s evocative painted squares. Very simple but emotional and alluring. I don’t really work with watercolor so it was a challenge to get it to do what I wanted. I still like this one.
Pushing this idea further I tried the same image but within a violin. As much as I like the simplicity of this one, I don’t know if it feels very special. I’m sure I’ve seen this cover somewhere before.
Continuing to push the violin idea, I tried combining the silhouette with an old Chinese painting I’d found. Internally, everyone found this quite lovely, but again, it wasn’t really signaling what this book was about.
I went back to the concept of using multiple images in an iconic way. The leaf clearly wasn’t selling, so I continued looking through imagery and stumbled on the tangram. This is a Chinese puzzle consisting of seven polygons. They can be put together to form many different shapes, figures and animals. After looking at the many possibilities I arrived at one that had a sense of resilience and had movement; running or perhaps swimming (back to trout river…)?
The concept of a tangram may not be known to everyone, but the design still worked as an abstract image. Pieces of a Chinese river landscape, pieces of the golden gate bridge, stamps and sheet music all in a single solid form that could work all on it’s own… And I said it couldn’t be done…
The author was quite happy with the final cover and it was one of the more challenging and rewarding covers I’ve worked on.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.