The morning after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, designer and illustrator Laura Eckes rode the train to work and read about the events of that day. She felt an all-too-familiar mix of emotions: anger, sadness, a desperate desire to affect change, and guilt over the reality that she probably wouldn't. But then she thought about work, and her coworkers, and decided this time would be different.
When HarperCollins cover designer Jenna Stempel was asked to design the cover for Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, she was sure that the book would prove to be successful. She could not, however, have foreseen just how successful.
Jenna Stempel is a Senior Designer at HarperCollins Children's Books in NYC with work notably featured in the New York Times and the 2015 New York Book Show. Here she talks with Spine once more about her elaborate design process in creating the anniversary book covers for the Little House on The Prairie Trilogy box set - presumably no easy task!
"My initial inclinations were to take a bunch of stabs at music video imagery and gig posters. Those indie rock bands show off an impeccably curated lifestyle of leaning against graffitied buildings in their threadbare t-shirts and watching the sun set on roofs in Brooklyn. I tried to capture that same romanticized city life on the cover."
