David Wardle on Designing The Miseducation of Evie Epworth
David Wardle is a designer, illustrator and typographer who, along with his wife, founded Bold & Noble, a company creating and hand printing wall art and homewares. Here he explains his process for creating the vibrant cover for The Miseducation of Evie Epworth.
I was commissioned to produce the cover for The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matt Johnson, the art director at Simon and Schuster. The brief was for the cover design to focus on the light-hearted nature of the book and also give a hint to the period the book is set in. I haven't worked on a lot of covers in this genre over the years but Matt gave me a lot of freedom to come up with ideas and the brief was quite open. I always start by just sketching ideas out on paper first and I like to try and come up with an idea to hang the design on rather than just trying to make it look pretty. Despite being set in the 1960s I didn't want the design to look like a vintage cover in terms of design/illustration style but rather use elements that give a suggestion of the period. It still needed to feel fresh and modern. Some of the earlier attempts at the cover before I got involved focused on a milk bottle as the main element, as the main character lives on a dairy farm. Initially I followed this approach but wanted to attempt to come up with a clever way of combing the main female character with the milk bottle.
This first approach worked reasonably successfully and I quite liked the idea of trying to combine the two main elements. The illustration style and typography still hinted at the 1960s but I couldn't resolve the bottle top/dress neck, and the unflattering shape felt awkward so I was never completely happy with it. Trying to retain everything within the bottle also meant that it was hard to make the typography impactful, there was just too much going on.
For the next approach I retained some of the elements from the initial idea but introduced the MG sports car driven by the main character.
I wanted to represent a particularly chaotic scene from the book and the car was a good way of adding some movement to the cover as it had previously been a bit flat and static. I still didn't feel the typography style was right and the colours needed some more work. It also felt like the type and image and all of the smaller details were competing for attention and things needed to be scaled back a bit and simplified.
The final version stripped out some of these elements and I resolved the issues with the font using 'Boogie,' a psychedelic inspired font by Doug Penick. I added smaller elements like the rope on the luggage rack and the milk crates that link to a particular passage in the book. The author name needed to be reasonably prominent and with the title being relatively long it was a case of trying to work the elements around the type. The cows and bottles lend themselves to the design being able to wrap around the cover as well as using them through the text as chapter heads. I presented a number of different colour combinations and this one was the one that made the final cut.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.