The Designer's ProcessVyki Hendybook, cover, design, book cover design, Jodi Hunt, My Fathers' Daughter, Hannah-Azieb Pool, Black Britain Writing BackComment

Jodi Hunt on Designing My Fathers' Daughter

The Designer's ProcessVyki Hendybook, cover, design, book cover design, Jodi Hunt, My Fathers' Daughter, Hannah-Azieb Pool, Black Britain Writing BackComment
Jodi Hunt on Designing My Fathers' Daughter

Jodi Hunt is a Bristol based graphic designer whose work includes designing book covers, vinyl sleeves and posters. Here she takes us through her process for designing the cover of Hannah-Azieb Pool’s memoir My Fathers’ Daughter.

My Fathers’ Daughter is a powerful and intimate memoir, in which Hannah-Azieb Pool takes us on her extraordinary journey of self-discovery. From an orphanage in Eritrea to life with her white adoptive father in England believing she did not have any living blood relatives. Hannah-Azieb takes us on her courageous journey to Eritrea to meet her surviving Eritrean family. It's a story of identity, family and home told with warmth and wisdom.

I was incredibly excited to be approached by Chris Bentham, Senior Designer, at Penguin Books to design this cover as part of the project ‘Black Britain: Writing Back,’ an amazing rediscovery series about Black Britain and the diaspora, curated by Bernadine Evaristo. I couldn’t have asked for a more touching story. As I went on this journey with Hannah-Azieb, it drew some striking parallels for me and my own journey of unknown family and identity that I’m only just beginning to explore. This really made the process a compelling, emotional and truthful one for me.

The goal for this cover was for it to feel vibrant, optimistic, truthful, intimate and vulnerable. Chris suggested an editorial style that could be playful and vibrant but also serious at the same time. I was looking to create a really strong bold and confident design.

Throughout the research I really wanted to get a feel of the sights, sounds, colours and textures of Eritrea. I was amazed by the beautifully worn Art Deco buildings in the cities of Asmara and Keren. The rich colours, circular windows, curves, diamond patterns and geometric ornamentation that laced the streets; on people’s skin, jewellery, fabrics and buildings. From this I knew I wanted to emulate these through collage and I began to play - I ripped shapes in paper, played with geometric lines and traced silhouettes of buildings.

 
 

Obscuring Hannah-Azieb’s face felt like a very fitting tool for playfully representing both sides of her identity. To begin with I chose to do a linocut style illustration, which then evolved into a more photographic approach in order to illustrate this depth of identity. This opened up great things as I played with shapes; I loved the idea of Hannah-Azieb’s westernised identity being displaced in these various forms that would pay homage to her long-lost Eritrean identity and pieces of the puzzle that she was putting together.

 
 

To explore this concept of duality through found shapes and ripped paper, I deconstructed and reconstructed her story, displacing her facial features on the page through the process of cut & paste. Finding the diamond shape ubiquitous in Eritrean patterns, I chose to play with half the diamond to depict this duality of Hannah-Azieb’s identity and the search for more. I started to use this to obscure her face and the faces of her family as if they held the other half to each other’s story and identity.

 
 

I wanted the typography to portray the curves, lines and worn textures of the Art Deco buildings. I felt it was important to incorporate the Tigrinya language spoken by Hannah-Azieb’s birth-family. She supplied me with her birth name ‘Azieb’ in Tigrinya and I hand painted the lettering so it would fit with the typography I had used for the rest of cover.

I chose the circular shapes to act as a window into Eritrean life, and used warm and vibrant colours to represent the warmth felt from Hannah-Azieb’s rich experience. This I juxtaposed with her black and white portrait to show the colour that was brought through this life changing experience of meeting her family and venturing to her birth home.

“A very striking cover by @jodi_hunt for Hannah-Azieb Pool's book My Fathers' Daughter. A fantastic addition to the Black Britain Writing Back series. Congratulations @HannahPool” Jacqueline Roy

A massive thanks to Chris Bentham for reaching out to me for this special project and to Hannah-Azieb for sharing your story, what a beautiful read.

 

Final cover

 

Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.

@PaintbrushMania