Anna Morrison on Designing David Toms's Pacemaker
Anna Morrison is a UK-based freelance art director, designer and sometime illustrator. She works mainly in publishing, designing book covers for a variety of clients in the UK and internationally. Here she takes us through her process for creating the stunning cover for Pacemaker.
Blood is pumped from our hearts out and around the network of vessels that stretch for thousands of miles. Our blood flows, courses, from the chambers of the heart – the innermost rooms, private interior, secret portion. Perhaps, though, it makes more sense to think of our blood walking through our bodies across those thousands of miles. Blood is pumped from the heart around the body at a speed of between three and four miles per hour. The average person walks at the same pace. Blood and feet synchronized as we walk streets, paths, trails, first steps to last.
In Pacemaker, acclaimed poet David Toms confronts what it means to live life while always walking in tandem with a rare heart condition.
I love working with Banshee Press, which is a small publisher of exciting, accessible, contemporary writing from Ireland. They only publish a few books a year so it's an extreme privilege to be asked to work on them. When they got in touch about working on the cover for David Toms's Pacemaker I was thrilled. I loved David’s writing and Pacemaker is no exception. He deftly blends creative nonfiction, poetry and diary in an account of resisting, confronting, and living with a rare heart condition. His experience, including his hospitalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to all of us in its exploration of what it means to live in a fragile yet resilient body, to walk mutiple challenging paths, and to always a find a way to keep moving.
My focus was to portray the absolute core of David’s fragility; the breakdown of the most essential organ of life, the heart. His vulnerability is exposed in how he writes about the nature of his illness, using a dreamlike quality in the wording he chooses and shifting the narrative into the realm of storytelling.
I began by looking at medical imagery around heart ailments and found it very cold and not very appealing, although I really want to portray a heart on the cover as it's central to David’s story. I found a vintage French illustrated medical journal that had beautifully drawn illustrations of the human body. As I played around with the image of the heart, I felt the two top valves were intriguing, suggesting where the blood flows/where the stories flows. I like the space around the image and wanted to make the title and author name separate from the heart so the eye is drawn to it. The title and author's name neatly balance in length, which can sometimes be tricky, especially if you need the author’s name to sing, however spacing them at the top and bottom felt comfortably balanced. I tried several different directions, some much more busy, but David was drawn to the simplicity of this design, which pleased me as I thought it was the strongest too.
Final cover
This book is a beautiful and deeply moving piece of work which I hope is reflected properly in the simplicity of the cover design. There is also a wry sense of the importance of optimism in his writing, living in the face of serious illness, and this is woven throughout the narrative. The end papers were created to portray the natural world that David writes so beautifully about and I feel it signifies a completion of the journey of his illness from dark to light.
End papers
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.