Book Cover Design
Bernardine Evaristo - 'Girl, Woman, Other
I have numerous projects showcasing narrative, storytelling, and visual communication. In this project, I redesigned the cover for Bernardine Evaristo’s book “Girl, Woman, Other”.
My intention for the front cover of Girl, Woman, Other was to depict the characters in the book and hint at how they are connected to one another. When I first read the book I found it slightly confusing to navigate across each of their individual stories without mixing them up, and it’s unique for a book to tell stories from the perspective of 12 different individuals, so I wanted to draw attention to this.
The character’s relations with one another are a vital aspect of Bernadine Evaristo’s novel, which I decided to use on the front cover as a way of enticing the audience to read the book, without giving too much of the story away. I found this helps visualise the relationships between all people presented in the book, yet still allows imagination from potential readers when they see the front cover.
Depicting each character in an abstract form was a way for me to leave interpretations of the book open while hinting at the interconnected stories within the chapters. The abstract forms gave me the freedom of creating a visual cover that depicted my interpretation of the book with limited information that allowed and enriched a reader's experience of my work because they are able to explore the cover and assign their own meaning to it.
Using abstract art enabled me to focus on form, colour, line, pattern, and composition instead. I studied various colour palettes first and based my colour decisions on research gained from British-Caribbean artists that take inspiration from their culture and heritage in their work. All the characters in the book are twelve Black British people who share interconnected stories with one another and overall paint a picture of contemporary Britain while highlighting the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. I, therefore, made sure to do exten-sive research focusing on the right colours I used that would empower the shared experiences of these women of colour.
