Lauren Harms on Designing How to Pronounce Knife
Lauren Harms is a designer based in New York, primarily focused on visual storytelling. She is currently an Art Director at Little, Brown and Co., an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Here she tells us how she created the cover for How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa.
How to Pronounce Knife is a wonderful and sharply written collection of stories about Laotian immigrants and refugees. They’re human and thoughtful stories about families and individuals who are determined to create a life. The characters are hard working, often doing manual labor as factory works, bus drivers, working on animal processing plants or nail salons.
The author and editor had put together a few book covers and illustrated patterns that the author was drawn to. The covers included My Sister the Serial Killer, Convenience Store Woman, The Incendiaries, There There and Strange Weather in Tokyo.
A variety of styles including everything from surreal photography to illustration. What they have in common is that they’re colorful and striking covers. The author’s examples were inspiring and left a lot of opportunity for experimentation.
At first I was drawn to representing the title literally and doing a type driven cover. Knife is such a weird word. Think about if you had never heard it before, how you might sound it out phonetically. K-nife, knife, knife, nīf. I liked that the pronunciation notation could be worked into the title visually. I also tried a few patterns, similar to what the author had sent as inspiration.
These early concepts lacked a lot and were reductive – I’m first to admit it, looking back at my comps. They portrayed the stories and Laotian narratives with broad strokes, rather than representing the strong, contemporary voice. And they were missing that unique hook that really draws you to a cover.
Another direction that was pitched was a single, iconic object that could represent the work the characters were doing. One of the stories is about a quiet ex-boxer who goes to work in a nail salon owned by his dramatic sister. It is filled with subtle and poignant depictions of a nail salon, and touches on the inherent workplace hazards.
I started image research, primarily focusing on the setting of the nail salon, but most of what I found looked too nonfiction. When I found this nail file, I was really drawn to the style of the photograph. It felt appropriate for the literary genre. There’s texture, in the file and background, and I liked the minimal shadow. Not to mention the high contrast of the sharp tip. A nail file is such a simple and minimal object, that a photo could easily look flat.
It didn’t take many edits to get the photo just right. I tweaked the color slightly – the original background is more of a blue pink. And I added the yellow to the handle for a little additional color. Then it was time to start laying out type. To counteract the straightness of the file I knew I wanted movement in the type and started with sans serif type staggered across, interacting with the image.
The author liked the image of the nail file, but felt the type wasn’t right. And I had to agree. It lacked the human quality of the stories. I broke out the iPad and tried a few hand drawn options, using different brushes and weights. This final iteration had the right texture, and the condensed forms allowed everything to get nice and big. With a bit of trial and error, all of the elements came together.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.