The Picador Book Room

Everyday objects take on sinister meaning in this subtle horror story. My first approved design was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “VERTIGO” with the objects arranged in a downward spiraling rabbit hole. But sales suggested we try to create a cover that appealed to the horror audience. I hired the talented Big Book/Thriller jacket designer Ervin Serrano, to help give this package a new look in that direction.

Here’s Ervin Serrano on his cover design:

“I’m a big fan of Japanese Horror. When Henry approached me to design the cover for Yoko Ogawa’s “Revenge,” I was ecstatic!

The book is composed of eerie, interwoven tales. At first, I thought it would be cool to convey those certain stories as graphic elements that would be incorporated together with the type and some textures (see second image from the top). Ultimately though, the cover was a bit too busy or playful. So I wanted to do something more simple and typographic but still captured that eerie feeling of the stories (see third image from the top). Although it’s much closer to what I had in mind, it now looks too much horror. It was probably the red background, so I played around with it some more and tried to mute it down. I finally came up with a solution which I thought worked pretty well (see fourth image from the top).”

With book trailers becoming more prevalent, Ervin and I talked about delving into the world of motion graphics. We thought REVENGE would make a great first project to learn on because of its dynamic type-driven cover design. We knew we wanted to animate the slashes on the book’s title type, but we also needed elements to lead us to that moment. We salvaged some of the line art from one of the cover outtakes, and sync’ed it to a minimal heartbeat soundtrack. Working with no budget or experience, we focused on creating a kinetic visual tone poem and came up with our first book trailer:

—Henry Sene Yee, Creative Director

This special bonus installment in our ongoing series highlighting Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil She Knows is a fascinating look into the process of a book’s jacket design. Thanks to the wonderful art team at Picador for allowing us a peek inside the machine. (Ed. note)

I hired designer Keith Hayes to create our cover. Keith is the designer behind the jackets of Benjamin Black’s A Death in Summer and Alan Glynn’s Winterland and Bloodland. These are his words:

When Henry and I spoke about this project we agreed that Staten Island should be a focus of the cover. There is mystery that surrounds the place where I grew up, perfect ambiance for the crime genre. Henry told me that the author was also from the Island, which added a bit of extra pressure. That didn’t bother me much though because I know the place inside and out so well. Yet, to my dismay, after finishing the novel the perfect image escaped me. It needed to look like commercial fiction. It needed to say both Staten Island and crime, but not in a clichéd way. Everyone knows the Staten Island Ferry and the Verrazano Bridge, but how else can I make Staten Island fairly immediate on the cover?

As the author points out, the Island is filled with beautiful homes and well-manicured lawns. I was searching for a way to say organized crime and corruption. Visually the Island doesn’t offer any of these secrets. I thought of going in a more graphic approach. I made some stencils from a map of the Island and used spray paint to fill in the shapes. After placing them in some layouts I knew I needed another layer. I decided to focus on the heroine of the story. Obscuring her face with the spray painted outline of the island added the menace and grit that I was looking for.

Then in an effort to make the cover look more commercial, we looked to George Pelecanos’ paperback covers for inspiration—coincidentally a series I also happen to design. I felt what appealed to us about the series was its use of photography to create a unique atmosphere.

Since I couldn’t find any acceptable night photography of Staten Island I decided to shoot the photograph myself. There wasn’t much time to wander the Island looking for the perfect scene, so I set out with my camera and went to specific areas mentioned in the story. One of those places is the out-of-operation Atlantic Avenue station on the Staten Island Rapid Transit system. I had to jump a fence to gain access to a bridge that runs over the tracks and connects the north and south bound platforms—a great location for a shot. Trains bypass the station once every hour, so there were long periods of standing around in dark silence, and every so often something that I perceived to be large moved through some brush under the platform. All of this and I had to worry about being arrested for trespassing. I really hoped this shot was going to work, but it was exciting to go the extra mile for the cover anyway.

In the end we decided to focus on the villain of the story. With no time to shoot anything new, I used an existing photograph and cropped in very close to make the character as menacing as possible. And that’s when we knew we had our jacket.

Cover Design: Behind the Scenes

Smut: Stories by Alan Bennett

For more details, head to my design blog to see sketches by illustrator Christopher Silas Neal and an earlier photographic approach.

For Chris Adrian’s The Great Night (available in paperback on May 8th), the goal was to create a cover design that conveyed the feeling of magic. We searched for photographs of trees, forests, night skies, stars, and magic, and ultimately chose the photograph that appears on the cover now. 

For the type, we first collected small twigs, arranged them into letterforms, and scanned them. This looked nice, but was a bit too organic and fought with the beauty of the image. The solution to this was to search for a font on myfonts.com, and we found Barocca Monograms. Its magical, hand-drawn, twig-like effect worked well with the image and created the mood we wanted. At first the type was large and filled the entire cover, passing over the tree and sky. Rather than keeping the type over the image, we made the type smaller to integrate it with the image, fitting it both within the tree as well as outside of the tree in the night sky. Our final choice was to keep the entire type treatment contained within the edges of the tree silhouette, yet just about to break out, giving the final cover design a quiet energy.