Stylistically, this month’s cover picks are all over the place—in the best and most surprising of ways, starting with Jonathan Pelham‘s enigmatic jacket for Cecilia. He breaks it down below—and, in the process, gives us a candid look at his process and the process of book cover design at large.
Official description:
Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, re-encounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus—each dubiously claiming not to be following the other—their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. As past and present bleed together, Seven can feel her desire begin to unmoor her from the flow of time.
Smart, subversive and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of violence and love, and the ghosts of girlhood friendship.
What was the brief here? You utterly captured a vibe.
Thank you! The brief asked for something “cool, sexy and startling.” Hopefully, some of those qualities made it through.
K-Ming Chang’s previous covers for the U.S. and U.K. markets have had a mythical storybook feel. They are gorgeous and unique pieces of illustration, and I adore them. For this outing, however, the publishing team at Vintage wanted to go with something bolder and more graphic. The idea was to retain a sense of otherworldliness while playing up the author’s edgier side.
How did you arrive at the final design?
Yeti Lambregts, a brilliant designer who works at Vintage, was my main point of contact there, and she gave me direction over email. So a good proportion of the credit ought to go to her and Vintage’s creative director, Suzanne Dean.
My very first visuals were illustrative, precisely the opposite of what they requested. For some reason, I feel compelled to do everything the hard way. However, they liked the approach of merging a crow and a woman.
I was asked to provide a second round with some kind of weird, corporeal, photographic element. This resulted in a second round of visuals that were mostly deemed too gross and tonally wrong. However, in this batch, I landed on the type and image lockup that we settled on for the final cover.
My initial reticence to explore a photographic route stemmed from a ridiculous idea on my part that it was in some way “too real” for such a strange book. But photography, of course, has always had an expressive and experimental discipline, so I’m not entirely sure where this conviction came from.
At first, I wanted this strangeness to be done “in camera,” which I felt was more organic and appropriate to the book than digital processing. But finding an image that could speak so specifically to the book’s themes turned out to be impossible, so I made my own “double exposure” image using photos by Innis McAllister and Mohamad Itani (both via Millennium Images).
What’s the significance of the crow and the face?
The narrator often describes the movement of crows around her. The central element of the book is her obsession with Cecilia, a woman she first met when they were both children. To me, the book seemed concerned with impermanence, transformation, yearning, and the sense of weirdness that comes from simply existing.
There’s obviously way more to unpack here, but I don’t feel particularly qualified to do so. Like a dream, the book is suffused with a mood that is at least as important as the narrative.
It’s a bit like an optical illusion at first—I didn’t see the face until I had stared at it for a few moments. Was that the intent at all?
Sort of. I was hoping for something that felt ambiguous but intense.
Another version of a similar idea had a woman’s eye in place of the crow’s eye. I really liked that approach, though it feels more self-consciously “smart” and lacks some of the mystery of the final cover.
The crow is definitely dominant at small sizes. At actual size, I always see the woman first. Perhaps it’s some kind of evolutionary bias (do we see human shapes first?), or because I already know to look for her. Or maybe I’m just reactively checking my compositing skills!
I like images (and art of all kinds) that don’t immediately reveal their meaning. Or where the meaning is evident but ambivalent. My father—who was an art director at Penguin back in the 1970s—introduced me to artists like Man Ray and Arcimboldo when I was very young, so I guess this stuff left some kind of impression. (I should make it clear that I’m in no way comparing my artistic ability to my dad’s, let alone Arcimboldo or Man Ray!)
How did you select the type treatment?
Almost 10 years ago, Ellmer Stefan of The Pyte Foundry released a font every week for a year. His work has appeared on many covers I’ve designed over the years (they’re also brilliant for scrolling through, just to see if any typographic ideas immediately jump out at you). Cecilia is set in Prhyme, which was one of these fonts. “Bold and just a little wrong” is an aesthetic category I can never get enough of. With such a short title and an author name that is begging to be stacked, it seemed to hit a lot of the notes we were looking for.
What about the color palette?
Black for crows, night, and mystery. Pink cuts against the severity of the black and is associated with love, sex, femininity, and … guts! I normally associate this combination of colors with cheap makeup packaging and that kind of thing, but tinting the image with a tiny amount of purple and yellow helped pull everything in a more sophisticated direction. It’s one of those subliminal things that you end up feeling your way towards rather than actively thinking about it.
