Laura Boyle on Designing Jade is a Twisted Green
Laura Boyle is a Toronto-based graphic designer and illustrator who works at a Canadian-owned book publisher as a layout and cover artist. Here she gives us a peek into her process for designing the stunning cover for Jade is a Twisted Green.
Jade Is a Twisted Green by Tanya Turton tells the story of Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto. It's a coming-of-age story of grief, passion, and chosen family. Through a series of whirlwind love affairs, parties, and trips abroad, Jade stumbles toward relinquishing the weight of her trauma as she fully comes into her own as a young Black woman. The writing is fresh and completely engrossing, with Jade as an unforgettable protagonist.
The first thing that caught my attention about this book was its elliptical title, which ended up becoming the main element that guided all other aspects of the design process. It’s evocative, yet on close inspection contains multiple interpretations that caused my mind to jump around, unable to quite come to a resting place.
According to Turton, “'Twisted’ is a reference to Jade’s path not being straightforward; a winding road on the journey to becoming, as well as ‘twisted’ in the eyes of society. The word evokes the belief of who we should be, and the labels we experience when we step outside of these expectations. ‘Twisted’ also speaks to the feeling of being twisted internally, tightly constricted in our sense of self. Also, the color green represents the heart chakra, Jamaican culture, and green earth. [The title] is a reference to Jade being a combination of these things coming together. She is a sum of various energies and metaphors sorting themselves out.”
In many ways, conceptually, this cover designed itself, because while other covers may require deeper investigation into themes and visual metaphors, I felt in this rare instance some of the most obvious choices really did seem best. For example, what color palette might I choose for this book that has not one but two references to green in its title?
I was almost immediately drawn to Magnies for the typeface, and though I of course explored other typographic ideas, I think everyone on the team agreed that Magnies, with its expressive swashes, perfectly embodies the title. The only difficulty I have with the font are the non-existent crossbars on the es, which, though beautiful in theory, presented legibility issues in the case of this design. To address this, I simply added a thin crossbar in a couple key spots to help fill in the blanks inherent in the typeface.
It was also clear to me that Jade herself should be represented on the cover; without her, the title becomes less accessible to the uninitiated reader. Although I tried some photographic routes, it made the most sense that the figure representing Jade be illustrated, with a confident pose, youthful (but not too young), and stylish. In terms of the background illustration, I wanted to evoke some sense of nature, but without losing sight of the fact this book is set in Toronto, a major urban center. An abstract floral-inspired background in various shades of blue and green, framing but also interwoven with Jade’s elegant pose, and somehow delicately balancing the whole with an ornate typeface, was a tricky undertaking — but I think the final design, after hours of finicky Illustrator work, presents a pleasing balance of these elements.
Possibly the greatest challenge overall was ensuring that the sum of each of these parts created a design that appealed to the target market and didn’t veer off into YA territory. Some of my ideas did skew too young, despite being comprised of rather similar elements. But Marketing and Editorial helped keep this in check and didn’t let me rest until I got it right! In the end we had a couple great options, mainly coming down to the character, and the author herself was able to choose the one she felt had exactly the right vibe. Ultimately, this is the story of a cover that came together fluidly, a complete meeting of the minds from inception to final, which is really something that a designer values and remembers forever: a true paragon of cover tales, from my perspective.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.