Sophie Paas-Lang on Designing A Victory Garden for Trying Times
Sophie Paas-Lang is a multidisciplinary designer, illustrator, and comic artist from Toronto. Here she details her process for creating the cover for A Victory Garden for Trying Times.
The original cover of A Victory Garden for Trying Times, a memoir by Debi Goodwin, looked quite different. With my background as an illustrator I’m always looking for ways to use illustration in my work, and this memoir seemed like a great fit. We knew that garlic, imagery that begins and ends the book and a symbol of faithfulness, would be our subject. The colours and type treatment were meant to evoke the style of the posters about victory gardens from WW2. I worked on some illustrated concepts and we ended up with this, and the whole team agreed on it.
Then, a couple of months later, sales and marketing came back and said the cover wasn’t going to work. We needed a new cover, and we needed it now. There was a time crunch because of various publicity and sales deadlines so I had to work fast. I tried some other approaches with my own illustration work, but it was becoming clear that it wasn’t the right fit for this project.
One night, I was at home browsing through images of botanicals on my laptop, looking for inspiration. I suddenly remembered an article I read on LitHub a couple of weeks prior about the work of Mary Delany, a woman who started creating gorgeous botanical illustrations out of cut paper at the age of 72, a practice she took up late in life to help ease her through the grief of losing her husband. I thought the parallels with Debi’s memoir were strong, a story about creating beauty during a time of grief and loss. The flowers in Mary Delany’s work are stunningly set off by the warm, dark backgrounds. They were perfect, absolutely the mood and style we were looking for. Too bad she never made any illustrations of vegetables, I thought.
And then I remembered that I’m a designer and I could just, you know, make my own.
The next morning I rushed in to work. I knew exactly what I needed to do. Within half an hour I’d sourced the perfect illustration of garlic, placed it on a warm black background, thrown type overtop, and presented it to the team. It was approved by everyone very quickly and then the author had an enthusiastic response to it, as well.
Final cover
This was really one of those situations where a setback made for a more successful outcome. If I hadn’t been told at the last minute that the cover wouldn’t work, I’d never have made the new one; a much stronger piece that I am very proud of.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.