Elizabeth Yaffe on Designing The Orchard

Elizabeth Yaffe is a designer and motion graphics animator in New York City. She’s currently a senior designer for Ecco Books at HarperCollins.


The Orchard happened to be the first book I was ever asked to design for Ecco. My Art Director, Allison Saltzman, emailed me the manuscript shortly after I accepted the position on staff with a note that she wasn’t expecting me to arrive on my first day with designs, but that it would be great if I could start reading. The stakes felt very high!

There’s a lot to untangle in this book and diving into it was the perfect way to ignore my new-job nerves. It’s a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy, Ari, who reinvents himself when his family moves from ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn to a ritzy Jewish suburb of Miami. He falls in with an exclusive clique of four boys, led by the magnetic and brooding Evan. At Evan’s urging, the group begin testing their faith in unconventional and metaphysical ways, pushing moral boundaries, and repurposing their Jewish beliefs to catastrophic ends. The book draws heavily on philosophy and religious tradition, much of which was new to me, intertwining them with teenage exploits like cutting class, first loves, and experimenting with drugs.

I read for work much like I used to read for English class: circling symbols and motifs, underlining key phrases, and starring themes. After reading, I distill those annotations into a page of notes and thumbnail sketches. Having that paper when I sit down to design helps me get my thoughts in order and can also be useful as a refresher if we revisit the cover in paperback.

Early on while reading, it became obvious that fire was an important recurring symbol. For fear of giving away too much of the story, suffice to say that even a relatively minor scene (compared to what comes later) involves a literal burning bush. Beyond just plot points though, fire was a strong visual conceptually, as it plays a central role in Jewish tradition, but can become unpredictable and deadly when underestimated.

My initial concepts used Jewish symbols transformed to convey the story; for example, I imagined Shabbat candles with one flame extinguished, stars of David broken down into graphic, triangular flames, and a Sukkah roof made of illustrated flames that looked like foliage. I also had several less overtly religious options which focused on the transformations and relationships of the characters. On all of the designs, I worked with simple typography so the illustration could be the focal point.

 
 

When I’m apprehensive about a project, I tend to fall into a trap of designing more options than necessary. But as also tends to be the case, my apprehension was unfounded. Allison had only minor revisions and all of the designs went over quite well at the jacket meeting, where four were selected to be sent to the author. Thankfully he was enthusiastic about them too and picked one, only requesting a darker green background and for the “c” in “Orchard” to extend to the right of the flames. I truly couldn’t have asked for a more seamless approval!

 
 

The final jacket has a dark green background and handwritten, white typography to evoke the campus setting. The fire, which I digitally illustrated, is neon yellow with silhouettes of the four boys around the edges. It vibrates with pink, red, and blue set behind the flames—a nod to the boys’ experimentation with LSD. The entire illustration collapses in on itself four times to symbolize the four tiers by which the Torah can be interpreted, a Jewish hermeneutic system called “Pardes.” This term in Hebrew can also mean “orchard,” and is linked to the Pardes legend. The legend tells of four sages who are allowed to enter the orchard of esoteric knowledge, only one of whom leaves unharmed. The novel is an allegory for the legend; the four boys seek the “orchard” and with it, a divine understanding of their faith. Intentionally, the center of the fire—the fourth tier, or, metaphorically, the “orchard”—is empty.

Repeating a fairly complex illustration on top of itself produced a bit of a Rorschach inkblot. There are no other symbols hidden in the flames, but when sending his feedback, the author wrote to say that he liked the bull at the bottom of the illustration. While there is no deliberate bull, it was a welcome comment; a jacket that is open to interpretation is particularly fitting for a cerebral story about the things we cannot ever fully understand.

 

Final cover

 

Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.

@PaintbrushMania