Charlie Fletcher on cover design @Edbookfest

    We often discuss book cover design on these pages, so it was with particular interest that I went to a talk on that very subject at EIBF today.

    The paperback cover image for Charlie Fletcher's novel Far Rockaway was the subject of a design competition for illustration students at Edinburgh College of Art, and the panel at this afternoon's event comprised Charlie himself, his publisher Anne McNeil of Hodder, Jonathan Gibbs, head of illustration at ECA, and the winning designer Astrid Jaekel. Together they gave us a fascinating look at the creative process and what goes into achieving the perfect pairing of book and cover.

    We were shown many examples of jackets for novels by writers such as Enid Blyton and David Almond, Cressida Cowell and Charlie himself, each collection highlighting the variations from hardback* to paperback, perhaps a film tie-in, a design for the US market, say, and later editions of old favourites. With every change, the interface between book and readership is being refined, the target audience more directly reached - that certainly is the intention.

    In the case of Far Rockaway, a novel which intercuts a narrative set in real life contemporary New York with scenes of fantasy involving characters from books such The Last of the Mohicans and Stevenson's Kidnapped, the cover had to combine these disparate elements and appeal to boys and girls alike. Charlie read the first chapter (and I think the audience could happily have heard a great deal more for we were gripped from the off), and we could then appreciate the challenge inherent in the instruction he'd given the ECA students: "illustrate that!"

    Astrid showed us the beautiful, ingenious papercut she'd made initially in response to the text and to the need to interpret it in simple and striking manner, a piece inspired by the drama of the book and the movement and elements of nature in the story, and then she explained that when her design was chosen, several more versions or roughs were made until the Hodder designers then shaped the final one into what you see above. This successful collaboration of the creative and the commercial worlds has resulted in a design which pleases both author and publisher, and which should attract a readership which will be enthralled by the book.

    Asked how publishers decide on jacket designs in the typical, more conventional process, Anne McNeil said they use "a mixture of intuition, experience and consumer insight". She commented that Charlie's work transcends genre, he can't be pigeonholed, and finding an image to complement his stories is a creative challenge. The initial brief is all-important, and everyone must work to that brief to come up with a design which tells the reader what's inside the cover.

    To end, Charlie talked about the creative process within the act of reading itself, as the reader's own imagination provides the images to accompany the story as it goes along. For this reason, photo-real covers "deprive the reader of being involved in their own reality of the book", and likewise Charlie would always advise reading a book before seeing a film version. "Humans need Vitamin S," he says, "S for Story."

 

*You can see the hardback jacket for Far Rockaway here .