Elizabeth Yaffe on Designing Chouette
Elizabeth Yaffe is a designer and motion graphics animator in New York City. She’s currently a senior designer for Viking/Penguin Books at Penguin Random House. Here she takes us through her process for designing the wonderfully unique cover for Chouette.
I first heard of Chouette as a submission that an editor was interested in pursuing. Art usually enters the equation after a book has been acquired, but one of the changes that the pandemic brought was that the meeting where editors pitch prospective books became a meeting that the whole team attended. I remember that the strange and compelling premise caught my attention more than almost any other submission discussed in those meetings; I was excited to hear that we would be publishing it and then, several months later, that I would get to design it.
The story reads like a modern, twisted fable. Tiny, the narrator, is pregnant and her husband is ecstatic about it, but Tiny is certain that the baby will be an owl-baby conceived with her female owl-lover. When Chouette is indeed born small and broken, everyone besides Tiny develops an obsessive need to find a “cure.” Tiny, accepting her owl-daughter as she is, becomes Chouette’s fiercest advocate, no matter the consequences. The story acts as parable for motherhood, acceptance, and the limits of sacrifice. I can’t do justice to just how dark and unsettling the novel is without giving things away, but it does grapple with horrors both allegorical and concrete. It’s the kind of speculative fiction that is an exciting design challenge: while it’s important to stay true to the darkness of the story, it still must look appealing on some level.
It was clear from that very first meeting that there would be an owl on the cover. The author sent images of owl artwork that she had used for visual inspiration while writing, but without pressure to specifically put those images on the jacket. They ran the gamut from her own paper cutting work to medieval bestiary owls, but what united them all was a storybook quality. Chouette is such a unique book—to the extent that the author requested that “A Novel” not appear on the jacket—that there weren’t any other real guidelines for what it should look like. I wanted to emulate the mythical sensibility of the author’s imagery, but beyond that was fully open to whatever style fit my ideas best.
My initial concept was inspired by the push and pull between reality and metaphor that is so key in this novel. I wanted to create a scene that felt soft and ghostly, like an image coming into (or maybe out of) focus. It’s the sort of Photoshop challenge that I love: I could picture what I wanted to make but didn’t have any sort of formulaic plan for how to get there. I did know that the image and type needed to feel like a single piece of art, so I worked with typography and imagery in tandem.
I eventually reached a point of diminishing returns with my Photoshop experimentation and decided to move on to another concept. Tiny is a professional cellist, a career that she gives up for Chouette, and classical music plays an integral part in the story. I imagined how arms wrap around a cello and whether the cello could be replaced so the same arms were instead attempting to contain an owl. This idea was naturally suited to a collage, where I tried two different owls. The owl holding a mouse more appropriately tipped to the disturbing elements of the book, but I included an alternative because I didn’t want the concept to be promptly rejected because of a dead rodent.
In researching owl illustrations for the collage, I stumbled across Raoul Dufy’s “Le hibou,” which had that intangible fable-like quality I was trying to recreate. I thought it might work well when I first scrolled past it, but I kept scrolling. Simply putting an owl on the cover didn’t feel like it was enough and I knew it would be a labor-intensive project to extend the square artwork to the correct dimensions. Without a clear next step after finishing the collages though, I kept going back to the piece, eventually deciding that even if it was less conceptual, at least it conveyed the right mood. Wanted this design to feel as claustrophobic as Tiny’s world, I filled every inch with leaves, pruning a few to make space for the title and author name. My initial designs using “Le hibou” was simply that: a denser version of the original piece. It wasn’t bad, but it did still need something else. After ineffectively playing with color for a while, I put it aside to return to later if there was time.
I wanted to include an option that was a bit lighter, both literally and conceptually. Liking the illustrative quality of “Le hibou,” this design is meant to represent the disconnect between who Chouette really is and how she is seen. Taking loose inspiration from the historical imagery sent by the author, I layered illustrations of an owl, a woman, and a dog (Tiny calls characters compelled to fix Chouette “dog-people”) to create either a single three-headed figure or three figures with the body of an owl, depending on how you perceive it. I set the illustration in a light blue oval in a nod to a moment that occurs in a swimming pool.
While illustrating the owl-woman-dog, it occurred to me that what “Le hibou” needed wasn’t color, it was another layer of storytelling. I always love a cover that reveals more details the closer you look, so after brainstorming a list of important symbols and objects, I started drawing them and tucking them into the leaves. Of all these very different design directions, this one immediately felt the most right. It took working my way through each concept, but what they were all doing was visually trying to marry an old sensibility with a new one: this illustration just felt the most effortless. In that sense, the designs were very much like the book itself, taking an ancient story about motherhood and reimagining it into a completely new tale.
The final cover is almost exactly what was initially presented. I was so sure that the eyeball in the bottom right would get vetoed at some point, but miraculously it did not. Through the approval process, there were a few small tweaks to the icons, the owl has a bit more space around it, and the sales team ultimately needed “A Novel” on the front, but the design is entirely unchanged from the original intent. To maintain the effect of a single piece of art, I knew from the start that I was committing to a complex wrap-around design: there are illustrations that nod to the story in the foliage on the back, and even a few small details within the illustrations. If you happen to find a copy in person, see if you can spot them all.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.