Carmen R. Balit on Designing Meena Kandasamy's Exquisite Cadavers
Carmen R. Balit is a book cover designer currently working at Atlantic Books in London. Here she talks us through her process for designing a wonderfully original cover for Exquisite Cadavers.
I was very passionate about this project from the start because the paperback edition of Meena’s previous book, When I Hit You – which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 – was the first cover I ever designed (more than two years ago) at Atlantic Books. To this date it’s still one of my favourite covers I’ve worked on, and so I was delighted as soon as I heard talk of her new book and eager to find out more.
The novel centers around Maya and Karim, a young couple who live in London. Maya works on a zero-hours contract for an unnamed liberal magazine and chain-smokes; Karim is trying to make it as a young film-maker. But, we also find the pages covered in footnotes which reveal the underbelly of the novel – all the inspirations and influences behind the story, from news articles, memories, films, books... The end result is a beautiful collage of fact and fiction.
Sample page from Exquisite Cadavers
The brief I was given was very open, stating that this is a bold piece of experimental fiction and they wanted a cover that reflects this (experimental, you say? Yes please!). I started as I usually do by reading the manuscript, which was vital in this case to understand the concept of the novel, and to see the marriage of footnotes and fiction. As I was reading, the main thing that kept running through my head was the idea of visually representing the unusual yet beautiful way the author created this novel. The title, Exquisite Cadavers, refers to the surrealist game of consequences, in which each person draws something and then passes it along to the next. This is what the author drew her inspiration from, and so I wanted to use this as a starting point to explore. For this my first approach was to follow the principle quite literally and create images using fragments from a number of other ones mixed and matched together, from here a number of new ideas sparked such as taking one image and de-constructing it to then piece back together, also creating a traditional cover only to then chop it all up and re build. The core of all these ideas was the same: take something that starts off looking like X and chop, re-arrange, glue, etc. to convert into Y, for me this was the best representation of the book both in terms of content but also structure.
This was when my favourite part began: experimenting! I started by doing a quick image search of potential photos that I could use – such as a camera, cigarettes, people, etc., and then printed a load out and the fun began. I started by de-constructing and re-arranging. I found a really intriguing image of this woman smoking which I decided to use as my main photo for this stage; I then spent all of a Friday sat at my desk carefully scalpeling this photo into small strips and rectangles, followed by building it again by re-arranging the small pieces. I tried a couple of more abstract photos too.
Most of the process for me was exploring how far I could push this idea of producing an image through another one. After each re-arrangement I photographed the result and then started again. Finally, after creating as many as possible, I reviewed the end results and transferred them onto my computer where I began editing digitally. I didn’t want to change the photos too much, so I mainly just adjusted the light and contrast, but I wanted to make sure all the imperfections from the cuts were still visible. I decided to hand write the tile, which I then scanned and overlaid with the image in the spaces I had left. After designing a few different options with this look I thought it would be interesting to try something similar but with type instead of image, so I very quickly typed out title and author on my computer in a variety of fonts and sizes and printed them all out, I then chopped them all up in random shapes and sizes and once again started re-constructing the cut-up type. I then scanned them onto my mac and began playing around with the colours and contrast. I had a lot of fun making these ones and was quite pleased with how they turned out!
I also worked on a few other options which were more straightforward collages using different elements from the text, still using Maya as my main muse but introducing more of Karim with other objects such as the camera. After reviewing all of these, I thought there was no way any of them were going to get approved, as I thought they were quite experimental. So, of course, I worked on a couple of other more traditional designs just in case…
Once I was happy with my selection of visuals I sent them over to the editor, Poppy, a bit unsure of what her response would be and was half expecting her to ask me to work up some more commercial approaches. To my surprise she was really happy with them. We then took them to the next covers meeting and I really believed there was no way the ones we liked were going to get approved, but as it turned out everyone loved the re-constructed face cover. I was so shocked and delighted, and there was only one thing they wanted me to change – to add some colour on the title!
It was unexpected, to me, that this very experimental design was one of the easiest ones I’ve gotten approved, as normally there are always tweaks and changes and multiple back-and-forths. Delighted, I went back to my desk and played around with the type, at first adding the colour onto the text itself, but then I settled for introducing the coloured box behind instead. I took these options back the following week with the selection of coloured boxes, and the orange was approved.
Final cover
The cherry on top of it all was that after getting such great response in-house, Poppy shared it with Meena and she loved it! The whole process of working on this cover was very rewarding, it was one of few cases where I had absolute freedom to create and experiment, my favourite things, but without having to comprise on the final outcome; and of course, an author who falls in love with their cover at first sight is wonderful too!
Full cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.