Steven Marsden on Designing Queer Asia
Steven Marsden is a freelance illustrator and designer specialising in book cover design. Here he tells us about creating a mesmerizing cover for Queer Asia.
I was commissioned by Zed Books to create this cover back in September 2018. Zed have been a client of mine for about 6 years and I have always enjoyed the wide variety of subject matter I get to work with. Often, I’ll be allowed free reign for the first round of options but for this title Zed already had a clear idea of the concept - so it was just up to me to bring it to life. I only had a few days to create the initial ideas as a cover image was needed urgently for that year’s catalogue. This is a rare example of a job that had a very quick turnaround that can add a bit of pressure, which I quite like.
Queer Asia is a book of essays on queer studies in an Asian context. Zed wanted this to be portrayed with clear, bold typography and using illustration rather than photography. They asked me to take inspiration from an illustration used by the Queer Asia Group (see below). The image shows the continent of Asia painted in multi-colour. At the time I thought this was done with watercolours but after finding a high-res version, for this article, I’ve realised it actually has a Photoshop filter applied to it.
Although it would have been nice to whip out the paints for this project, time was of the essence so I decided to use some stock images from the website graphicburger.com. I often use this website as - alongside the products they sell - they give away mock-ups, fonts and images that are 100% royalty free. They have a particularly good collection of watercolour textures, so I downloaded a few to use as a starting point.
I chose a few of the best shaped textures which I then edited in Photoshop to make them bright and more solid in colour as they were originally all quite muddy and made up of multiple blended shades. I chose to use bold primary colours with pink rather than red, which is possibly a stereotype or cliché of the Queer community but felt this was what the brief was asking for. The Queer Asia Group image looked a bit murky to me and I didn’t want there to be any danger of that with this design. I went heavy on the yellow, cyan and magenta for each block of colour respectively. I added a multiply blending effect so they’d interact with each other nicely.
I also wanted have a couple of options with the cut-out shape of the continent of Asia. I thought this was probably a bit too close to the original Queer Asia Group image but it’s always good for the client to have a few routes to choose from. I created this by finding a vector file of the outline of Asia which I then used to cut out the shape from one of the watercolour textures.
I played around with some san-serif typography. One of the fonts I used is simply called The Bold Font – it does what it says on the tin and I like the tail of the “Q”. This is the font used on the final design. I also decided to do a slightly more conservative serif option, using Caslon, to show some variety.
The way I usually work it to rattle off about 20 variations and then whittle them down and refine the results. These are the 4 options I ended up sending to Zed for the first round:
Zed chose option 3 which I was quite happy about. It was used for the catalogue without any tweaks. A month later I received some feedback – they liked the Asia cut-out from the other options and wanted to incorporate it into the chosen design. Seeing as there was a clear circular shape in the centre of the cover it made sense to add the continent shape to this so it looked like a globe.
Due to some ‘political issues’ I had to add inverted commas around the word ‘QUEER’. I never did ask why exactly. I made the decision to remove the texture effect from the title to make it stand out more as solid black and to reinforce the CMYK palette concept. A few more tweaks to the copy and some fine tuning of the colours and this is what we ended up with:
Final cover
Full cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.