Kelli McAdams on Designing Everyone in this Room Will Someday be Dead
Kelli McAdams is a book cover designer, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Here she takes us through her process for designing the cover of Everyone in this Room Will Someday be Dead.
In Emily Austin’s debut novel Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. In an attempt to take control of her debilitating anxiety, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and too embarrassed to correct the pastor who assumes she’s there for a job interview, Gilda finds herself with a new job, replacing the church’s recently-deceased receptionist Grace.
I knew I wanted to work on this book as soon as I heard the synopsis, and when I got my hands on the manuscript I spent the day on my couch reading, alternately laughing and crying and texting all my friends to tell them how excited I was about this project. I felt a deep connection to Gilda as a character, particularly because I, too, have spent an inordinate amount of time obsessing over death. The novel so perfectly balances the morbidity of Gilda’s situation with humor and warmth, and while it explores some of the darkest recesses of the depressed brain, it’s also refreshingly hopeful about our capacity for compassion and our ability to connect to each other.
I was given some direction to start with, like tone/sensibility words (lively, literary, existential, eccentric, abstract, unique, funny, absurd, hopeful) and some comp titles, books with bold and colorful covers like Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things and Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin. I had a pretty good idea of what sort of look I was going for based on this information, and I set about designing my first round of comps.
Given the novel’s tone and content, I knew that my biggest challenge would be striking the same balance Emily Austin did in writing it: playful and poignant in equal measure. I felt pretty strongly that a handwritten title would be the way to go, but I tried out some bold and simple type options for the sake of variety. I played with a couple of different directions, and dug through thousands of stock photos of kitschy Catholic imagery, inspired by the wall of crosses near the desk where Gilda spends her days. Another fixation of Gilda’s was on human hands—looking at them, she can’t stop picturing the bones and muscle and sinew moving just below the surface of our skin—so hands feature repeatedly throughout the comps.
Additionally, there are two animals with prominent roles in the novel: Mittens, a missing neighborhood cat, and Flop, Gilda’s childhood pet rabbit. Flop in particular was a specific request from editorial, because discovering Flop’s lifeless body was the traumatic event that sparked Gilda’s obsession with death. Plus, rabbits are a great visual symbol for anxiety. I found a gorgeous illustration on Stocksy by artist Kristina Balashova, and I liked the colors so much that I kept them almost exactly the same for the initial design I sent to my art director. We then worked up a second option with a bold blue background color and slightly different type for the title, because sometimes we can’t get away with doing all-lowercase.
We showed the comps during a cover meeting and the results were unanimous: people loved the bunnies. I was really happy with that, because out of all of the designs, it was my favorite. As previously stated, I connected to this book on a profound level—I myself have struggled with OCD for my entire life, and most of my obsessions are related to death. This illustration is a perfect representation, to me, of what that kind of anxiety feels like: the bunnies hop across the page, frenetic, but the rows of repetition convey that they aren’t actually going anywhere. They’re stuck in an endless loop, just like Gilda’s racing thoughts.
After we settled on the design direction, we made some more tweaks. We went with the lowercase title treatment (which I preferred because it speaks to Gilda’s unconventional personality), spaced the bunnies out and made them a little smaller, and chose a simpler font for the author name to let the title take prominence. From there, the only real challenge was the color. We tried… a lot of options.
When all was said and done, we ended up going back to the original color palette, sans the blue title type. It’s a twist on a primary color scheme, the foundational blue/red/yellow with that pink thrown in for an extra dash of playfulness. Overall, I’m really happy with the result, and I feel lucky that I got to work on a novel as special to me as this one.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.