Emma Dolan on Designing Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality
Emma Dolan is a book designer at Penguin Random House Canada. Here she takes us through her process for designing the stunning cover for Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality.
I’m a horror fan, so naturally I was excited when the cover brief for Lindsay Wong’s new book arrived in my inbox. I immediately asked Lindsay’s editor, Deborah Sun de la Cruz, for a copy of the manuscript. As I dug in, I paid close attention to the style and tone of the writing, attempting to draw out the visual personality of the story. If the book were an image, what would it look like? Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality is a collection of surreal and hilarious immigrant horror stories that mixes ancient myth with modern day social satire, explores themes of family, trauma, vanity and love, and is populated by a gruesome assortment of ghouls, ghosts and zombies. This was going to be interesting!
The first thing I had to consider was the title. It’s beautiful and mysterious… and long! Designing a cover involves plenty of creativity and imagination, but it also demands a certain pragmatism. Space is a big factor. How much do you have, and how are you going to use it? In book design we call this “visual hierarchy” – the emphasis placed on the key elements of the cover (title, author name, and image). A long title can be tricky to work with because the balance between image and text is more elaborate. The elements compete with one another, confusing the eye about where to look, so it requires an image that complements and builds on the title without distracting from it.
When it comes to cover art, a book designer is nothing if not resourceful. We use everything we have at our disposal to come up with the right image. Sometimes we create our own art, sometimes we source it from other artists, and often it’s a combination of the two. It all depends on what look we’re going for. Deborah and I agreed the cover needed to be both pretty and sinister (lucky for me, there is no shortage of beautiful and weird art out there). I filled folders with delicate paintings of dead birds and disembodied hands, rich still-lifes full of flies, beetles and rotten fruit, imagining how each might interact effectively with the title. There’s an epicness to TMPTAI—the stories stretch across oceans and centuries, giving the book a fantastical quality. I wanted to capture this otherworldly feeling on the cover.
I usually create upwards of 10-15 designs before narrowing down my favourites. I experiment with different styles of fonts and images, and often end up in a completely different place from where I started. Occasionally though, the first idea is the one that sticks. In an early image search, I found an illustration of bright blue and magenta mushrooms. It seemed like the perfect hybrid of natural and uncanny, as appealing as it was unsettling. What could be more befitting a beautiful horror story than a dainty little colony that grows on decay?
When my first round of cover concepts was ready, I sent them to Deborah with a few brief notes. The first reaction can be significant, and I like to let the editor experience the designs on their own before we meet to discuss. From there, they pass through many hands to gather feedback, with a long list of factors to consider (style, tone, readership, genre, trends, palette, legibility…), but it can often come down to the impact of that first reaction. In this case, we explored many directions, but we kept coming back to those little glowing mushrooms—they just worked. After a few rounds of revisions, we finally felt ready to show Lindsay.
Sending a cover to an author is a nerve-racking moment. It takes an enormous amount of faith when a writer trusts us with their work, and we don’t take that lightly. It can take a few attempts, but there’s no greater feeling than reading that excited reply: “I love it!”.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.