Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill has hired me from Faceout Studio to design three cover options for Heading Out to Wonderful. The client, Algonquin Books set up shop in a woodshed behind cofounder Louis Rubin’s Chapel Hill, NC, home. He and Shannon Ravenel founded Algonquin as an independent press devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction by undiscovered writers, mostly from the South.
Challenges/Goals
The goal is to redesign a book cover and create three solutions that would accurately display and represent the book to it’s full potential. I have choose the book Heading Out to Wonderful, which is fiction that tells the tale of a suspenseful and obsessive love. The goal of this project is to create a book cover that better represents the emotions felt reading this book. These book covers should be functional, professional and cohesive. They should also be designed in a way that is appealing to the its target audience.
Solution
Heading Out to Wonderland is an exciting, erotically charged, and altogether unforgettable story of love gone terribly wrong in a place where once upon a time such things could happen. It’s a story of love, betrayal and the vulnerability of children. The story is dark and foreboding, and is told in a way that compels the reader to read a few pages more than they planned and then another few pages as well. The narrator’s idealistic depiction of the town is challenged by unspooling episodes of narrow-mindedness, judgmental, and racism that smothered whatever dreams the people there might have had. Into this claustrophobic small town, Charlie and Sylvan arrive suddenly, like tropical birds blown off course and stranded in an inhospitable clime. They recognize something unnameable in each other, an intoxicating cocktail of longing, mystery, and isolation. In the first book cover, I chose to use a bed of water that is surrounded by flower petals because Charlie had saved Sam in a drown accident. In the water there was an emphasis on red and red roses because Sylvan wore bright red lipstick as well as they symbolization of red throughout the book. There is a butcher knife as well as some money in the water to symbolize Charlie and its connection with Sam and Sylvan. It’s meant to show the readers that the story can get murky just like flowers in water. The second book illustrates the old town house that Charlie resides in, giving the book a homey and small town feeling. The smoke from the chimney represents how hazy and distraught the story is. There is also a reflection between Charlie and Sylvan in the smoke to further illustrate the clouded perspective of Sam and the story. The last book cover illustrates a photo frame of a small town that is shattered. This represents Sam’s loss of innocence and how his world was shattered and changed in an instance. The use of darker styles and tones was used to show how mysterious and dark this story is.
