Sinem Erkas on Creating Topics of Conversation
Sinem Erkas is an award-winning graphic illustrator and art director with an appetite for experimentation and a good sense of fun. Here she takes through her process for creating the cover for Topics of Conversation.
The design for Topics of Conversation came about very quickly. I’ve always been a fan of Maria Svarbova’s minimal and static photography and when my editor put an example of her work in the brief, I knew I had to try and make one of her swimming pool images work! The brief was to have two women in or near water and it’s rather tricky relying on stock photography, so I felt very lucky to be able to license one of Maria’s pieces. She uses a Hasselblad camera, which gives her photographs a very special cinematic quality and the colours are very subtle and retro. The story spans 2 decades and is structured as a series of conversations in different settings and I loved this sterile scene of two women in this very still swimming pool. The women look like they could be in conversation but are not giving too much away, they are just frozen in time.
I felt the photograph was so strong that I didn’t want to mess about with it and wanted the typography to blend in and feel like it was part of the image. So I made the type white and left aligned to be in keeping with the stark photograph. I warped the title in the water subtly to get a slight ripple effect, and made the grouting in the tiles overlap the authors name as if the text was part of the tiles in the background.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.