M4 / Book Design / Sketches & Concepts

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh.

This is a novel about a disgustingly wealthy, depressed woman who concocts a plan to hibernate for an entire year, using a series of drugs copiously prescribed by her oblivious therapist. I love the original novel design, and think the woman in the Jacques-Louis David painting captures the miserable, sardonic, tart demeanor of the novel's spoiled narrator perfectly (even if she is emphatically described as being extraordinarily thin and blonde in the text). However, I think it would be a fun book to redesign due to the imagery.

 

For my design, I used the principle of continuity. I imagined the cover and back as two angles of a prescription pill bottle, with the label text being used for the book's summary on the back. On the front, I envisioned a drawing of a woman sleeping inside of the bottle, completely submerged in a sea of pills. Although it is not realistic, I wanted a variety of different colors and shapes of pills in the same bottle for eye-catching variety.

Lullaby (2002), Chuck Palahniuk.

The simplest description of Lullaby is that it is about a magic culling song, or ancient African chant, that is distributed across America when it is published in a children's anthology book of lullabies and poems. Two of the protagonists are widowed parents who had read the culling song to their infants and killed them, and realized that it is because the chant is genuinely lethal. They recruit two other characters who have never read the culling song to come on a road trip with them to find and destroy every copy of the book across the country. 

The book's story is complicated and messy, and I feel the original cover is simultaneously too simplistic and too messy. I liked the inclusion of the dead bird, because one of the turning points of the novel involves a series of dead birds falling out of the sky. I wanted to keep the dead bird element in my cover, but make it a bit more thematically meaningful.

I wanted the design to utilize the bird scene, but also play with the travel aspect of birds, since this is a road trip story. I wanted four flying birds on the cover to symbolize each character. I imagined red stains on the wings of the two characters that have killed, and clean wings for the two innocent, younger characters. I want the tip of the beak of the bird symbolizing the antsiest, most reckless character to carry over into the spine of the book for continuity's sake.

Continuing the continuity for the back cover, I wanted a perspective of the four birds flying, but from a ground angle. I picture the far-off silhouette of the four birds flying away in the top left corner of the book, above the summary, and a red puddle of dead birds below the description, symbolizing the death and destruction the characters tend to leave in their wake.

The Silence (2020), Don DeLillo.

Wikipedia's description for the novella is the most concise summary to explain my cover design:
"[O]n the night of the Super Bowl, Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are flying home when their plane crash-lands. In their Manhattan apartment, married couple Diane Lucas and Max Stenner are waiting for Jim and Tessa to arrive to their Super Bowl party. Martin Dekker, one of Diane's former physics students, is the only guest who has arrived. Suddenly, the world's technology systems go dark." 

The original cover is one of DeLillo's better ones, but I thought it would be fun to design my own. 

I imagined the cover art as an eerily empty football stadium, with the only figures in sight being a far away couple (symbolizing Diane and Max) and a single person several rows away (symbolizing Martin). I think it illustrates, metaphorically, how desolately cut off from the world Martin, Diane, and Max are from the rest of the world, and even each other, when technology shuts down. 

While it looks busy, I plan to put a rather dark, gray, cold filter over everything to make it more cohesive. I would use a gray text lighter than the rest of the cover to make the title and author more visible.

For the back cover, I would like to put a glimpse of the crashed plane, only slightly in frame. I don't want any other people in sight, or active fire or movement on the plane's carcass. I would like for it to look completely still and silent, and not take up too much space. I want the rest of the back cover to be dark, black, and empty, aside from the descriptive text. 

Bleeding Edge (2013), Thomas Pynchon.

Bleeding Edge is a chaotic book to summarize, but the gist is that it is a postmodern detective story set in the era of 9/11 and the dot com bubble burst.

Most Thomas Pynchon book covers feature very memorable iconography, so I was disappointed that this one was just bold print on a dark background without much of an identity. The story features a lot of symbols that could be used for the aesthetic, and it delights in period-relevant fashion and branding trends, such as the firm and website title names like "hashslingrz," and "hwgaahwgh.com/ (abbr. Hey, We've Got Awesome And Hip Web Graphix, Here)." I think the time period is ripe for cheeky pastiche in the design, and I was toying with using some overlay textures of cheesy Y2K Matrix-style coding.  Another important thing I wanted to highlight was a subtle running motif of butterflies in a discreet reference to MK Ultra and Project Monarch. I think the image of the wings also calls to mind the butterfly effect, which is fitting for a novel that ties several different conspiracies and cultural events together. I had the most fun coming up with concepts for this book, and felt it needed a redesign the most.

My biggest concern is that the twin towers are somewhat irresistible to use from a cover design perspective, because their shape is immediately recognizable, and follows several different Gestalt principles on their own (proximity, similarity, connectedness). And it is easy to utilize the principle of closure. The ambiguous image of two tall rectangles next to each other are vague in concept, but because of the cultural impact of 9/11, the shapes become very loaded imagery. Americans will immediately fill in a vague suggestion of the towers.

My first concept for the cover art, to keep things interesting but minimalistic, was to have the shadow of two rectangles with the pattern of monarch butterfly wings filling in the silhouette.

I originally drew the sides of the tower to make them three-dimensional, but I think that may be unnecessary. It is recognizable as just 2D shapes. 

I tried out a reference to the dot com bubble burst, but I felt this was too heavy-handed. I liked the idea of the rectangles being reflected in the bubble with a matrix code texture overlayed. Ultimately, I think this is too clunky and mixes up metaphors a little too much.

My final image is more playing with the concept of bleeding edges. I was worried about the imagery of the towers being a little insensitive and provocative to invoke in a book cover, so I wanted to obscure them a bit further. I think smudging the edges between them makes the image a bit less recognizable. 

This is also where I found my favorite design choice for the text. I think blurring the edges of the bottoms of each letter adds more stylization.