Katie Tooke on Designing a Peachy Cover for Objects of Desire
Katie Tooke is a book cover designer and Design Manager for Picador. Here she takes us through her process for designing the vibrant cover for Objects of Desire.
Objects of Desire is a collection of stories of women's lives focusing on desire and the complications that this creates. Sometimes they are vulnerable but sometimes they are the aggressor. Thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives - from the brink of adulthood, twenty and thirty and on into middle age. It is an intimate and uncomfortable collection with mordant humour.
After reading and talking to the editor about Objects of Desire, in all honesty it was a little tricky to find a route through. Our original approach was to look to represent women somehow but everything I tried didn't quite work.
I found it hard to get the right age of women so that it was aspirational for everyone, and it was hard to find an image that could represent all women.
There were loads of visual clues throughout the book, of which the sentence ‘The time we stole a peach from the bins in front of the supermarket, just because we'd always been tempted' sparked an idea to use the shape of a peach, or fruit in general, to represent this idea of delicacy and desire.
The fruit bruises, the skin is delicate, desirable, delicious, juicy, fleshy and the colours seemed to be perfect imagery for the collection. I looked at using just one peach, but it somehow didn't allow me to create the lush intense colours I was after.
I set about using all sorts of textures, paints, crayons, pencils to layer up a picture of peaches. I wanted to try and get lots of depth to the textures and build up rich colours.
Once I had finished this I knew that I wasn't going to use the picture as it was. I then took it into Photoshop and cut out shapes of the peaches, using shapes I had cut out of paper.
I zoomed in close to some of the textures I had created and dropped those into the shapes.
I played around with the typography but using the shapes to hold the text worked best. Finally the flat deep rich blue background seemed to set off the pinks/peaches and oranges I was using.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.