I have previous experience as a packaging designer, so when I get a series like this I tend to look at it as though I’m developing a product line. That is to say, instead of developing three covers for three separate stories, I develop an overarching visual look, and then tailor that look to each individual story. It’s almost like creating a visual language, and then using that language to express three distinct ideas.
Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost is a poetry collection by deaf Indigenous author Sage Ravenwood, to be published this fall by Gallaudet University Press. For the cover the author wanted to incorporate images of ravens in some way. The brief stated “ravens represent the crossing of dead.” I could show elements, claws, feathers, anything that got the idea across. It was even suggested that I take a look at a bird that had passed on, which I found interesting.
Along with materials and direction from the publisher, I was afforded the opportunity to discuss the cover creative for this book directly with both the author and translator. It was agreed that the overall drive of imagery should convey a certain “gallows humor.”
The story’s setting takes place in WWI, where a captured Portuguese Expeditionary Corps Captain is taken to a German prison camp. I did an image search on the PEC and other related imagery. From that I found two images in particular that had, what I felt was a certain quality of gallows humor.
When the brief came in from Ani Deyirmenjian at University of Toronto Press it included a picture of an engraving of Tigris, at the Foot of Paradise, by Gustave Doré, from 17th-century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s an interesting image.
To be published by Liveright on the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death (June 15, 2021,) Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows is an unprecedented portrait of the Emperor seen through his engagement with the natural world.
Along with the brief for this project, Design Director Steve Attardo had given me a number of interesting images with which to play around and draw inspiration. One of them was this great image of Napoleon resting after working in the garden. I made a design around it. I decided to recolor the garden in blues reds and whites to have the garden symbolize France. I also thought the shot of blue would retail well. You’ll notice at this point of the process we had a different subtitle.
Nataliya Deleva’s award-winning debut Bulgarian novel, Four Minutes, is a multi-layered portrait of the kids left in care homes for orphaned and abandoned children during communism and its painful aftermath in Bulgaria. (more)
Book cover designers Cherie Chapman and Eric Wilder have joined forces to create Chapman & Wilder, a new studio that spans specialties and, well, the Atlantic. Chapman, a Brit, and Wilder, an American, have gathered their collective expertise in design, layouts, and marketing and have enlisted the talents of photographers and animators. They have also created a new website where their passion project lives.
