Elizabeth Yaffe on Designing The Removed
Elizabeth Yaffe is a designer and motion graphics animator in New York City. She’s currently a senior designer for Ecco Books at HarperCollins. Here she takes us through her process for designing the stunning cover for The Removed.
The Removed was a book that I unexpectedly loved reading. The manuscript arrived in mid-March, about a week after we transitioned to working from home and about a week into my pandemic-induced reading slump. The story of one family’s pain interspersed with the voice of a Cherokee ancestral spirit sounded interesting, but not interesting enough to distract me from reading the news, figuring out how to use the VPN, and whether or not it was okay to go to the grocery store.
I carried around the manuscript for weeks, and quickly approaching deadlines forced me to finally put my phone down and settle in with my binder-clipped pages and a pen. I couldn’t put it down.
The book is a wild ride and describing the plot doesn’t do it justice. Suffice to say that it’s a vignette of a contemporary Cherokee family suspended in grief fifteen years after the unjust death of their teenaged son. The book tracks several different family members, each with their own distinct narrative. Woven through these narratives is the lyrical voice of an ancestral spirit who recounts Cherokee folklore and history, a device that isn’t immediately clear, but becomes all the more powerful once the echoes between the past, present, and future are recognizable. What particularly struck me about the story was how the magical is blended with the real, the historical with the contemporary, and the natural with the technological (holograms play a key role in one of the narratives).
The only direction that came from the editor and author was to please avoid using birds and feathers — the author’s first book that featured a bird and feathers felt too stereotypical for a Cherokee story. That’s not a request that can be eschewed lightly, even though the book is an absolute menagerie of birds: ghostly birds, pet birds, metaphorical birds, and magical birds, to name a few. With direction to avoid avian imagery though, I pivoted to other recurring symbols that felt cover-worthy, imagining how to use them to evoke the dichotomies that made the book so compelling.
I presented a range of designs and several were selected to be sent to the author and agent. The design that the author felt had the most promise was a wisp of smoke that looked like a figure, intended to strike a balance between ethereal and literal. The figure was open to interpretation; it could have been the ghost of the teenage son, Ray-Ray, or the ancestral spirit, Tsala, or any person who was fleetingly here and now gone. The delicate, contemporary type interacted with the smoke and was treated with a multicolored effect in a nod to the holograms.
While the author and agent liked the design conceptually, they asked to see some changes, wondering whether the figure was too abstract and whether any depth could be added to create more of a scene. I pursued a round of revisions, adding noses and arms to make the figure more obvious, and darkening the edges of the background to add atmosphere. I was still keen on the design, so I mocked up what the full jacket might look like with smoke wrapping around to the back; sometimes showing an editor and author the potential of a full design can help sway their opinion. Despite my best efforts though, the revisions were not addressing their qualms.
My second round of designs was intentionally more atmospheric than conceptual. While revising the smoke concept, someone had suggested adding a literal fire to the background—it didn’t work on that design, but it was a place to start for this revised direction. I researched new images and began layering them together to create depth, starting with a bonfire beneath a snake, and really just experimenting to see what worked well together. I did use an owl, with an apology to the editor; it looked quite different from the author’s first book and I couldn’t resist trying just one bird. What came from these explorations was a set of designs that had a similar moodiness to the smoke, but with more color, atmosphere, and visual depth.
Incidentally, the approved cover is the final design I put together, an idea I tried on a last-minute whim. I had a PDF of the new designs attached to an email, ready to send to my art director, when I decided to review it one last time. Looking at it again, it felt too one-note; I wanted to include something that was a better compromise between the first round and second, something that tread the line between conceptual, graphic, and atmospheric.
The design takes loose inspiration from traditional Cherokee basketry patterns, using squares to complicate a straightforward image of a figure walking down a wooded path. The image flips upside down, backwards, and sideways within the pattern, evoking the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative. While the figure walking down the path could be drawn from any of the narratives, if you look closely, it appears to be glitching, as a hologram might. I used a bold type treatment for practical reasons — it was a balancing act to get anything at all to read well over the colors — and because I wanted the type to assertively frame the figure, creating a focal point within the visual. The auxiliary type is hand-lettered to soften the hard angles in the design.
Close-up
Once I sketched out the idea, the cover came together quickly. I was pleased with the result, but it felt like a much bolder approach than the others, so I was unsure how it would be received. The complete second round was sent along to the author and, of all the options, he picked the bold one (after all that, my favorite), approving the design with no changes. It’s not a cover I would have come up with to start, but a good reminder that sometimes it takes working through your initial instincts to arrive in a place that best visualizes a story, especially one that takes you upside down, backwards, and sideways.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.