Kelly Winton on Designing a Beautifully Vivid Cover for Blood Red
Kelly Winton is a designer and artist based in New York working for publishers including Grove Atlantic, W.W. Norton, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Here she takes us through her process for designing the cover of Gabriela Ponce’s Blood Red.
The cover design for Blood Red came together very organically. I was hired as a freelancer by Restless Books and worked with Alison Gore who art directed the project. The cover memo had very specific and interesting art direction, Alison even provided a Spotify playlist for the book (which was a first for me!) and a Pinterest board of images. I was excited to begin working on it.
Blood Red by Gabriella Ponce and translated by Sarah Booker is a novel written like a fragmented narration by a female protagonist going through a break-up and an unplanned pregnancy. She is forced to confront her body in a new way and there are a lot of striking visuals. The novel is an exploration of sexuality, menstruation, the female form, and the conflicts women face with pregnancy and motherhood.
From the cover memo it was key that blood, sexuality, and the female body would be major themes to incorporate on the cover. The book doesn't shy away from getting graphic in discussions of blood and sexuality and we wanted that to be conveyed on the cover.
Flowers are also referenced throughout as the narrator spends a lot of time in a garden and flowers are seen as a sort of continuation of the birth/womb symbolism.
Because the novel feels very stream-of-consciousness — we also wanted a cover that felt psychedelic, strange, and maybe a little warped from reality. All my designs focused on red and pink tones to reference the blood elements (and most obviously the title) as well as a human body. I did several designs that overtly reference blood, menstruation, vaginas, and bodily functions but I kept the artwork feeling abstract, so the designs felt more suggestive. I wanted these designs to be forceful but also kind of ethereal, sexual, and mysterious. I used textural elements with splatters and water drops to give the covers some dimensionality.
The chosen cover was in my initial round of designs and I was not asked to do any revisions or changes, which is rare. The editor and author responded to the floral design and it was a done deal! I think the high-tone saturated flowers give an erotic, dreamlike feel while also being a little more nuanced and less graphic than some of my other comps. The final cover features a myrtle illustration that I warped, blurred, and saturated on photoshop until it felt like a hallucinogenic silkscreen that feels representative of the narrator's experience and state of mind. I always appreciate a boxed art design for its streamlined look and the black border here feels appropriate in capturing the dark, reclusive nature of the narrator. The serif type treatment gives the design a vintage feel that pays homage to a sort of trippy, pulp fiction cover. It was a great project to work on and I’m happy with how it all came together.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.