Owen Gildersleeve on Designing Frankly in Love
Owen Gildersleeve is an award-winning artist based in London, specialising in handcrafted illustration, set design and art direction. Here he takes us through his process for creating Frankly in Love.
At the time I was first approached to create the cover for Frankly in Love the manuscript had just emerged from a bidding war between 10 publishing houses, placing the novel as one of the most highly anticipated books to be released in 2019. It felt like a real honour to be approached by Penguin Random House to design the cover artwork, but the pressure was certainly on! I had already received some excerpts from the book and it was clear that this was something special.
From the extracts and brief I’d been sent I realised that David Yoon’s headline character Frank Li was a personality that was so well written it’d be impossible not to identify with him. He creates an account of adolescent love that is painfully familiar and his wide eyed incredulity at how issues like racial and cultural identity and family affect this precious moment in his life, offers a refreshingly honest insight into these challenges. His unusual powers of observation along with his youthful tendency to attach meaning to even the smallest of actions cleverly highlights the many ways in which society is often ignorant to these issues.
A short time later I received the full manuscript and was instantly hooked. The tone of the book is refreshingly real. The first page of the introduction had already made me laugh but had also gotten me thinking about some pretty important issues. On having a look through David Yoon’s (brilliant) website it became apparent that this ability to take a light-hearted and sometimes hilarious approach to issues of significant depth and complexity were very much at the core of his work. The idea of creating a cover that echoed this attitude was set in my mind from this point.
I began to work on 3 concepts for the cover, roughing these out in the form of simple pencil sketches – A way I still like to work up my initial ideas, even though people are often amused that I haven’t shifted onto digital sketching! The passage “both within and without at the same time... like I have two bodies... or maybe like I’m having an out-of-body experience” had really stuck with me, as it sums up so perfectly the feeling of disconnection that Frank experiences as he tries to fit in with two cultures. I wanted to keep my concepts typographic so came up with the idea of doubling the title type to create a graphic overlaid form, representing the double life that Frank feels he is living. Pushing the concept further, the typography developed to reveal layers of lettering below.
My work is hand crafted from layers of cutout paper, which are then carefully layered up with small pieces of foam board to create depth and shadow. The layered artwork is then shot in my studio using natural daylight to capture the paper texture and give nice soft shadows. So I was aware that as the number of layers increased so would the complexity and intensity of the shadows. As well as this, although the novel is so much about the layers of complexity surrounding cultural identity, it is also set in this incredibly vibrant and youthful world which I felt it was important to communicate. So with that and the effect of the shadows in mind, I decided to build up the layers of colour starting with darker blues at it’s very deepest, gradually lightening the tones as the layers rose to bright blues and greens and finally a lemon yellow top layer, which really adds that bright youthful feel to the cover.
Once the artwork was photographed I then edit the images myself – It’s great to see a project through from initial concept to final handover! The shots are edited in Photoshop and I try to be respectful of the handmade process, keeping in lots of the intricacies, and only tweaking colours slightly if needs-be and cleaning up of any dust and obvious errors.
The feedback from the final artwork was one of my favourite parts of this process, with David Yoon getting in touch to carry out an interview on the process of creating the cover and my studio. It was a wonderful opportunity to share our excitement about the future release of Frankly in Love, you can see the full interview on his website here. The buzz around the book also really start to kick-off, with Frankly in Love appearing in so many recommended reading lists and reviews – seeing the cover appear unexpectedly in a Guardian feature was a highlight. As the first release made its way to various critics and reviewers I was thrilled to hear that the novel was being so well received and super excited to see people sharing images of their advance release copies on social media.
Final cover
Finally some copies of the book arrived at my studio and were even better than I could have hoped! My artwork has been finished off with a beautiful embossing and spot-varnish, highlighting the layers in the typography and contrasting beautifully with the texture of the yellow paper which had been printed on a nice uncoated stock. To top it off the pages of the book were edged in ultramarine blue and the end pages had been beautifully illustrated by David Yoon himself, who I had no idea was such a talented artist as well as writer!
It’s always a pleasure to work on publishing projects, but Frankly in Love will most definitely remain as a project I am particularly proud of. David Yoon’s amazing talent for creating such a well defined character is certainly something that grabbed people’s attention, so it’s been wonderful to see the book do so well and to have the opportunity to be part of the experience. It’s also been lovely since the release to be contacted by various international publishing houses to create alternate language variations of the cover, a nice addition to this wonderful story.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.