Pete Garceau Designs a Psychedelic Cover for Pathological
Pete Garceau is the Art Director for PublicAffairs books. He designs covers for other publishers including Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, W. W. Norton, St. Martin’s Press, Little, Brown & Company, Hachette Book Group, and Knopf Doubleday. Here he talks us through his process for creating the cover for Sarah Fay’s new book Pathological.
Pathological is a memoir that tells the story of the factors that led to, and then consequences and aftermath of, the six misdiagnoses Sarah Fay received over a twenty-five year period (anorexia, major depression disorder, anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder). The standard method used to diagnose these disorders is massively flawed, and Sarah launches a deep investigation to expose the truth.
Art director Adrian Morgan, at HarperCollins, hired me to design the cover. The goal was to make it look both memoir and investigative journalism, with pops of color, a little bit irreverent, and punchy. And I personally wanted to the cover to reflect how the author must have felt, after so many misdiagnoses. The feeling of losing her sanity.
I thought it would be best to keep it mostly typographic, since images can sometimes say too much, although I did try a couple simple illustrations. The book went through several subtitle changes as well, the first of which was “A Punctuated Memoir”. So some of the designs integrated punctuations.
After the subtitle changed a couple more times, we had to ditch the punctuation concepts and make the type do all the work. This was actually really fun because I was able to experiment with somewhat of a psychedelic style. And breaking the title and making everything BIG only made it better.
The final cover did everything we needed it to. It’s big, bold, colorful, trippy, and also looks personal with the handwritten subtitle.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.