Holly Dunn on Designing Liam Quane's Road to Juneau
Holly Dunn is a book cover designer based in New Zealand, specialising in illustrated book covers. Here she takes us through her process for designing the evocative cover for Road to Juneau.
I was delighted to have Road to Juneau come through my inbox. Liam's book is a science fiction novel set in a future version of New York. He described it as being the "anti Ayn Rand" and wanted to take some inspiration from both Brutalist aesthetics and Art Deco.
For this cover, we didn't go through very many concepts or iterations. Liam had a rough sketch of how he imagined the cover could look, so this was a collaborative project. I took that idea and refined some elements and added in the typography. The hourglass is an important symbol in the book, as is the Valkyrie, the figure central to the story and the cover.
For the lettering, we wanted to stick with the Art Deco style. I looked at a variety of typography examples from the time period and made up a set of letters based on that research. Making the R, D and J larger helped to balance out the text.
Likewise with the illustration, and following Liam's initial sketch, I stuck with that Brutalist style with strong angles and straight lines. To balance the cover out, I made the bottom half of the hourglass slightly wider than the top. I don't think it's especially noticeable, but it does make the design feel more grounded.
Liam wanted to stick with quite a simple colour scheme that would work with both the Art Deco and the science-fiction themes. Because of that, we decided on a blue background with the illustration in gold.
I tried a few variations here and ended up going with this starscape stock image to make it extra spacey. I also experimented with having the text and illustration in contrasting colours, but decided that the simplest solution was the best one.
Final cover
Full cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.