Todd Atticus on Designing She's a Killer
Todd Atticus is a book cover designer and Creative Director of SlashBackslash. Here he takes us through his process for designing the cover of She’s a Killer.
As soon as the new Kirsten McDougall novel dropped into my inbox, I knew that nothing but the boldest design work would do it justice. The book is tense, witty, sharp, and packed with ideas and motifs that lent themselves to a strong cover. The trouble was picking which to focus on.
She’s A Killer is set in a near-future New Zealand where rich foreigners are fleeing to escape the effects of climate disaster. Against a backdrop of food shortages, societal unrest and fear, we meet Alice, a thirty-something university administrator with a near-genius IQ and an imaginary friend. When Alice meets Pablo, a so-called ‘wealthugee’ (wealthy refugee), she thinks she’s found a way out of her dull existence, but when she meets his teenage daughter she’s forced to think again.
For a book with a razor-sharp title like She’s A Killer, the design process began quite counter-intuitively with something more domestic: a candied pineapple. The pineapple appears throughout the novel but is also a symbol for the way capitalism turns nature into something artificial, almost monstrous—only outwardly sweet.
The candied pineapple seemed like a fitting gesture for the overall cover direction: glossy, eye-catching, but with an undercurrent of disquiet.
Photograph copyright © 2011 Jean Cazals
I quickly discovered that stock imagery of candied pineapples were pretty thin on the ground. The author shared an image she particularly liked and I started to see some potential in it. The image is taken from a cookbook of an old Parisian confectioner, À la Mère de la Famille, and as the publisher enquired into usage rights I started working up some concepts.
Food photography has a great staged quality to it, so the pineapple, pan and spoon were already arranged in a way that maximised their presence. I was really pleased with how they sat against a solid colour background. To avoid the photo looking a bit static on the cover, I rotated it and set the type at an angle, overlapping (and being overlapped by) it.
As striking as this concept was, I was keen to introduce an element that made it a little more sinister. We played with different colourways and added a strong cast shadow, which abstracted the shape of the pan and pineapple and added a bit of depth to the cover.
This back cover featured diced pineapple chunks that continued the visual metaphor from the front and references one of the novel’s scenes where Alice’s mother recounts an episode of Alice’s bullying behaviour as a child.
We were about to send the design to print when we all had a change of heart. After weeks of staring at the design, it suddenly felt too clean, too whimsical for this book. Unlike the preserved fruit on the cover, the design began to rot.
So with the print deadline looming, I hit the drawing board again. This time I focused on working more typographically and trying to achieve a sense of unease through incorporating texture or unusual colour selection. Morse code features prominently in the story and was an aesthetic feature that made it into many of the next round of concepts, either very obviously or more subtly.
After cornering myself with the candied pineapple for so long, I found this stripped-back approach liberating. I was freed-up to consider impact as a vital component to the design, and pushed into some bold graphic treatments.
The publisher and author coalesced around the concept with the red textured background, white and yellow text and Morse code. I was initially keen to see if these elements could be preserved with some of the other compositions I had been working on, so tried these out, aware that in order to work, Morse code would have to be dropped.
I also tried a range of backgrounds and colour ways with the preferred direction, but this only led to the realisation the red, yellow and white palette was the most striking and brooding.
The Morse code is a repetition of the text it sits beneath. Both elements achieve a form of parity with identical colouring and alignment. They’re presented with a clinical exactness that I hope our protagonist’s imaginary friend would appreciate.
The type floats above a background texture of blood red and midnight blue. The ambiguity in the shapes feels appropriate and brings to mind several things at once: topography from an aerial view; the sinew of muscle tissue; an approaching storm system.
Seeing the final cover in print, I was really pleased with how the process yellow and white lettering reverberate against the red. The whole cover has a confident presence which feels appropriate for this exhilarating and memorable novel.
Although the path to the final cover was somewhat circuitous, the journey proved to be just as fun as I was anticipating and, thankfully, no blood was spilt in the process.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.