Stephen Brayda on Designing The Lost Shtetl
Stephen Brayda is an Art Director for HarperVia. Here he takes us through his process for creating the cover for The Lost Shtetl.
News of uncontacted indigenous tribes being “discovered” fascinates me. Max Gross imagines life without awareness of the modern world in The Lost Shtetl, his incredible debut that hooked me at page one.
A small Jewish shtetl known as Kreskol exists deep in the Polish forest, so secluded it missed out on modern amenities and is even spared the horrors of the Holocaust. A string of events sends an unprepared villager into society, and Kreskol is unwittingly put on the map.
I wanted this cover to be as memorable as the read was for me. Sketches always start out rough and often the challenge is converting the scraps into something with substance.
My initial concepts went from literal vintage postcard to more abstract and less representational. Ultimately, the forest concept felt most appropriate as it tapped into the overall feeling of The Lost Shtetl best.
This direction allowed the art to extend throughout the entire physical jacket, printed gritty and tactile the way these trees might actually feel. I wanted the reader to get lost in this masterfully crafted Polish forest the way I did, then take a helicopter ride out and tell all their friends about it.
Full cover
Final cover
The Lost Shtetl will be published October 13, 2020 in the US and November 26, 2020 in the UK.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.