Marina Drukman on Designing The Blue Book of Nebo
Marina Drukman is a Ukrainian-born graphic designer and art director, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Here she takes us through her process for designing the quirky cover for The Blue Book of Nebo.
The Blue Book of Nebo takes place in post-apocalyptic Wales. A mother and her teenage son, the only survivors of a mysterious explosion, are trying to survive in their rural home, in a world where death is in the air, and no other people remain. At some point they find an empty journal with a blue cover in a neighbor’s house, and decide to document their lives in it. Both of them are stern characters, they don’t share much with one another, but they share with the blue book.
Using hand-lettering was an easy call: quite literally the boy writes “The Blue Book of Nebo” on the cover of the journal they find. In fact, the author requested that the cover be a simple blue one with the title and her name written on a blue background, and nothing else. I was hoping to persuade her to do something more interesting: the book has some amazing imagery. But first I did the all type treatment.
I then focused on two different visuals from the book: a dark cloud, and a hare.
The ominous cloud is hanging above the village, and the characters don’t know what to make of it, but have a feeling that it has something to do with the explosion, and everyone dying. Then there was a mostly irrelevant fact that “Nebo” means “Sky” in my native Ukrainian language (in the book it’s simply the name of the village) but I couldn’t shake off.
The most fascinating image, in my opinion, was Pwyll the hare, described as having “a second flat, dead face on the back of its head.” In more gruesome detail: “the lump had a small mouth and teeth and two tiny ears. And two dead eyes, as if someone had stolen its eyeballs”, a visual that’s hard to ignore, and is there for a reason: the hare, just like the book, is gentle and terrifying at the same time. But having the literal depiction of this unfortunate creature on the cover was out of the question.
I explored some variations on the double-headed hare, one of them is just a black blob with two pairs of ears and pink eyes.
I then decided that the hare’s head can be a bomb (why not) and had him take over almost the entire cover. This comp named “bunnybomb.psd” was my favorite. I balanced it out with happy shades of blue and pink to make it less terrifying, but it might have made it even scarier. I also created an entirely different type treatment, less precious, almost a scratched-on, uneven handwriting of a teenage boy.
I then put Bunnybomb aside, and I decided to use an old engraving of a hare: the mother character reconnects with old Welsh songs and language towards the end of the story, and I thought bringing in something old school would help translate that. I then put him inside the letter O in the title, and threw on the cloud in there too.
It felt a little too comical for this pretty dark story, so I wanted to see what happened if this hare head got more attention. I put it together with the scratchy handwriting, placed the head in the middle of the cover, and gave it a shadow that’s looking in the opposite direction: mother and son constantly had to be on the lookout for all kinds of dangers. And it also serves as another head that you don’t see right away.
I crossed out the hare’s face with a few pencil strokes that are used for the type. It was an emotional gesture: when Dylan sees the hare for the first time he is terrified. And the feeling doesn’t completely go away even after he befriends the hare. Eventually his mother kills the animal, which also works quite well with the crossed out image. I was asked for a few variations of shades of blue, and the lines for the final round.
This is the final design:
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.