Jo Walker on Designing the Paperback for Weather
Jo Walker is a freelance book cover designer and Art Director at Pushkin Press. Here she details her process for creating the paperback cover for Jenny Offill’s Weather.
To say I was ecstatic to be given this job by Sarah Wasley at Granta is an understatement. I absolutely love Jenny Offill’s writing so this was a dream job.
As I read the book, I ended up with pages and pages of notes and was spoiled for choice.
After doing more than 30 jackets (including one featuring a tuna candle), I settled on the idea of doing something with a nest. There’s a strong theme of our habitat, our place in the world and the crushing anxiety of what will happen to it in the future. The main character’s fear was tangible and I needed to get this across. An empty nest felt like the right image for me.
My Mum had brought me an abandoned nest that she’d found in her garden so I decided to scan it to see what would happen. I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my scanner! I quickly drew a nest with a marker pen and it just felt right - the marks of an anxious writer (the character took a creative writing course). I chose hand drawn type as the book is full of humour so I didn’t want it to look bleak, I also felt that hand drawn type gave it a more personal feel which felt important as the character's concerns are shared by many of us. The addition of the feather in a contrasting Pantone orange was to hint that something had been inhabiting the nest that had now fled.
Final cover
This was one of those one in a million jobs that was great to work on and went through straight away!
One day I will get a tuna candle on a cover…
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.