I’m Jack, a designer at Walker Books, and I designed the cover for Daylight Saving by Edward Hogan (out now!). In this post I’m going to talk about how I made the cover.Daylight Saving is about a young boy, Daniel, who meets the also-young Lexi whilst on a father-son bonding trip to Leisure World. Lexi is covered in cuts and bruises and spends her evenings loitering round the resort’s fake lake. She's a mysterious type, not least because her injuries are getting progressively worse not better. She swims at night for the relief of the cooling water, diving deep to escape into the dark, and this was the image I chose to put on the front of the book: one of mystery, vulnerability and immersion ... combined with references to the strong themes of time and fate.
If you’re in a rush, here’s the whole thing as a 36-second animation. All this was done in Photoshop, except for the bath bit (which was done in the bath).
I began with this photo of a swimmer.
Then I gave her an extra leg and played around with the colours and contrasts to make everything more nocturnal and creepy. I floated a big clock face over everything so that her legs become hands.
I would have quite happily left it at this point, but it kind of needed some words on it. I printed out the title, laminated it, and put it in the bath. It kept floating up so I weighed it down with tins of peas. Splashing the water around with my left hand I took photos with my right until I got the distant refracted feel I was looking for.
The final book cover is printed onto holofoil, a kind of shimmery silvery stock that helps sell the mysterious, other-worldliness of the story. It also helps us to show how highly we think of Edward Hogan as an author and just how proud we are to be publishing his YA books.
The foil is lovely but it's loveliness is pretty much impossible to convey in a photo and so because so much of what we experience these days comes via internet-pixels we wanted to also make a kind of screen-based equivalent. That's why we made this shimmery online version too that bloggers and tweeters can share around. People seem to find it meditative to push around, like one of those Japanese sand gardens, so that's nice. I've just started work on Ed's next book and it's another cracker. I've no idea what to put on the front of it yet though - feel free to tweet me suggestions @jackdraws!
Thanks Jack, the trick with the tins and the underwater text was very cool. And we still can't stop playing with the animated cover! Daylight Saving is an absolutely fantastic thriller, gripping from start to finish. If you haven't already seen it, here's our book trailer for it.
Daylight Saving is out now, available in paperback and as an eBook (but surely you'd want the paperback so you can enjoy Jack's shiny cover!)
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