Holly Ovenden Gets Creative with Collage for If I Had Your Face
Holly Ovenden is a freelance designer and illustrator based in London. She has previously worked in-house for Penguin General, a division of Penguin Random House, and Bloomsbury Publishing. Here she tells us how she created the striking cover for If I Had Your Face.
If I Had Your Face is a debut novel told through the eyes of four women in contemporary Seoul. The book explores South Korea’s extreme beauty standards and the obsession of achieving the ultimate feminine ideal - whist trying to survive in society. Amongst the social and economic hierarchies, beauty is often seen as the greatest commodity and it can be achieved through expensive and sometimes extensive plastic surgery. It is a glitteringly dark and unsettling read.
When the brief landed on my desk, I immediately felt the pressure to do this debut justice by designing a unique and eye-catching cover. The brief was, however, quite specific. It suggested looking at make-up and beauty products with a hidden, ominous angle. I started by designing a couple of visuals, one with a smashed eye shadow palette; one with makeup brushes aligned in a fan with an unexpected scalpel; another with a drip of nail polish that looked like blood.
After designing six or so 'beauty' visuals, I felt these were a little simplistic and inadvertently reflecting a story about botched surgery or bad makeup, rather than the lives of the four women. I decided to design a couple of off-piste options that leaned more towards K-pop culture, using bright colours and jarring patterns, taking inspiration from South Korean advertising and packaging. From these designs, I wondered if there was a way to evolve and combine the literal face of a beautiful South Korean woman with the make-up items, and play on the theme of a ‘mask’. I decided to perform a bit of Photoshop surgery myself and cut out the face from the woman’s head and added in what could be bandages that could hold the type. I started to form a sort of photo collage. The make-up items looked a bit strange placed in the face cut-out, so I tried carnivorous plants, and butterflies. I was really pleased with this visual, even though it was quite sinister!
Unbelievably, the cover meeting liked the cut-away collage face visual. The editor sent the design over to Frances Cha and sadly the design just didn’t sit right with her, the insects were a bit much. Looking back at it now perhaps it was too morbid for the cover. We then sent back options with different flowers in the face, and also the make-up products.
During the time it was being discussed with agent and author, I wondered about how the back cover could look (alas, I was quietly confident the author would approve). I used the face that I had cut-out from the front, split it in half and started to arrange the bandages and cut-out flowers around the outside. Almost like an inverted version of the front.
The tweaked visuals were rejected and with one final shred of hope, I asked if we could show what I had designed for the back cover (which was a little less creepy) and rather than a dark background I added pops of colour, settling on the powder blue of the passionflower stamen. All hopes were resting on this. In-house, everyone seemed to be happy with this lighter version of the original. Third time lucky, Frances and her agent approved the blue cover and everyone was happy!
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.