Stephen Brayda on Designing Lost in the Spanish Quarter for HarperVia
Stephen Brayda is an Art Director for HarperVia. Here he takes us through his process for creating the cover for Lost in the Spanish Quarter.
The cover art for Lost in the Spanish Quarter needed to somehow embody an entire literary event: it is the very first title published by HarperVia – the newest HarperCollins imprint focused on publishing amazing fiction in translation, and author Heddi Goodrich translated the novel herself from Italian to English. I geared up for action.
Goodrich’s writing is a full sensory ride. A visual cue that stood out to me as I read is the way she writes of Naples as a character: a living, breathing contributor to her story. Crumbling buildings and crowded streets showed up in very rough sketches early on, along with different lettering experiments to help drive home the experience of intimacy.
My search for unique interpretations of the Spanish Quarter led me to the work of Olivier Roussel, an early 20th century-inspired painter based in France. His depiction of the Spanish Quarter was painted on location in Naples – the most ideal way to capture the authenticity of Goodrich’s story.
Roussel’s art perfectly visualized the way Goodrich’s Spanish Quarter felt as I read:
“Night was a watercolor bleeding down onto the Quartieri, but nonetheless the timid warmth of that spring afternoon remained trapped in the streets, caught in the webs of forgotten laundry and in the clouds of frying squid and sickeningly sweet trash.”
and seamlessly fit the bill for an introduction into the world of HarperVia: “an invitation to encounter other lives and other points of view Via the language of the imagination.”
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.