Gabriele Wilson on Designing Rabbit Island
Gabriele Wilson is a New York and Berlin-based graphic design studio creating book publications, restaurant branding, packaging and identities for an array of clients. Prior to opening the GWD studio, she worked as a jacket designer at Alfred A. Knopf. Here she takes us through her process for designing the truly gorgeous cover for Rabbit Island.
I have had the honor to be the main cover designer for Two Lines Press/The Center for Art of Translation in San Francisco, CA since 2013 with CJ Evans and Jessica Sevey. They are a designer’s dream as they have been so open to experimentation.
I had worked on Elvira Navarro’s provocative book A Working Woman and I was excited when the editor told me the author had another title called Rabbit Island coming up.
Rabbit Island is a collection of eleven stories with strange, disturbing and beautiful atmosphere. A false inventor who upsets the natural balance of life on an island on the Guadalquivir River, a regression to a supernatural childhood memory, an inhospitable hostel, or a changing city all paint a picture of unraveling or mysterious situations that hover over the reader disguised as something irresistible.
The stories portray what lies within feelings, unconscious dreams and memories of the past. There is something threatening, unnatural, surreal and unexplainable in them—relationships that are difficult or characters dealing with a difficult or strange situation that is derailing them in some way. I felt the cover image needed to look abstract and slightly surreal. Collections of stories are my favorite type of book to design. It’s a great challenge to find common themes that run through the stories and represent them visually and also connections through references to type or handwriting.
In terms of imagery, in one story there is an island where rabbits living there become cannibals and meat eaters. And in another story an animal paw grows from a woman’s ear. There is a lot of beautiful ocean, seaweed and flowing and blowing hair imagery. But the images that stood out the most were of rabbits, goats and hair. I felt it should be a clean, bold single image approach.
I should mention that we were exploring an updated series design at that time so I applied my covers to my proposed new cover series layouts and then after seeing those rounds the press decided they wanted the covers to be more free-flowing and share just a few elements rather than a more grided series look.
Here are my first comps exploring both cover imagery for an updated series look for their books to come:
After seeing these comps, the press decided they wanted to go with a less grided system where each cover had its own visual and typographic identity. I don’t believe in showing more than three different directions and when I was in-house at Knopf, we only showed one direction in our first round a la Paul Rand! But as a freelancer, I tend to show more since I’m further from the editorial process. I came up with the following directions both focusing on the textures and animals of the stories and also pitching the idea of having designer/collage artist John Gall create a layered collage (bottom row left 2).
The rabbit fur was approved unanimously. The cover art was printed on paper over board without a jacket with the type embossed. I was tempted to layer hair over the type in areas but with the emboss it could make the type less readable. Two Lines Press also created a custom fur cover for subscribers which was a huge hit. Here is the final result.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.