Anatomy of a Book Cover: Still a Family

Our Creative Director Cathleen Ouderkirk is so enthusiastic about her job because, as she puts it, “I get to spend all day looking at cool visual ideas and thinking about what colors look good together — it’s a fun gig.”

Some of the ideas she must art direct for book jackets are not so fun though, and may even require a little soul-searching to put together. In our new book, Still a Family: A Guide to Good Parenting Through Divorce by Dr. Lisa Rene Reynolds, the challenge was how to create a hopeful cover about a negative subject. To achieve a great jacket, Cathleen assigned the job to Pema Studio, a Berkley design team (aka Gina Phelan and Dan Tesser) that creates jackets that are “clear but complex,” as Cathleen says. “Pema has an amazing ability to come up with designs that you can grasp visually right away (very important for packaging of any kind) and yet often have an extra element of meaning that turns a nice jacket into a great jacket.”

So how did they come up with the cover for Still a Family?

CATHLEEN: Hey guys — this is our first “anatomy of a cover” post, and we’d like to talk to you about Still a Family.

PEMASTUDIO: That wasn’t such an easy cover to think about: it’s such a difficult subject. So many people go through the experience of their family breaking up—something like fifty percent of marriages end up in divorce! — yet the model of the family as an intact unit is what is iconic or typical.

CATHLEEN: Here’s what we assigned you as the way we wanted Still a Family to feel: “Practical but compassionate, realistic but emotionally embracing.” What did you do with those contradicitons?

PEMASTUDIO: Well, as we often do (we work as a two-person team), we started by brainstorming visual metaphors for “family.” We tend not to think so literally of our cover assignments; we tend to go for what might be evocative. We think in terms of visual symbol perhaps… I [Gina] have a photo of my family etched in my memory: of my grandmother and her four remaining children taken right after World War II, and for some reason it’s one of the strongest visuals that came up for me when we were brainstorming… At any rate, we thought about what families do together, what defines “family,” or what iconically represent the family. All these stock photos came to mind, against a treacly musical bed…

CATHLEEN: But those are all “togetherness” images — how were you going to show the split?

PEMASTUDIO: We weren’t there yet, but we knew that we had to start with the idea of what family is in order to create an image of what it is not. But the photo of my family stayed with me…

CATHLEEN: You could have shown a photo ripped in two, but that would be so…

PEMASTUDIO: Cliched! And overused. We always confront the issue of who exactly is being represented in any given photo—remember that we’re not shooting our own images for covers but are relying instead on what stock photography can offer. It’s really tricky finding that perfect shot that will appeal to the greater majority of the market, or that won’t exclude any part of the audience. The potential reader has to be able to identify with the book before she or he will pick it up to buy it, so who is and isn’t represented is always a dilemma. You want to make sure that you don’t put anyone off.

CATHLEEN: That is so true. Whenever we have jackets that use photos of people, we spend much longer debating over whether the person or people are appealing, you know?

PEMASTUDIO: Of course. We do the same thing on our end, before we ever send the comps out to you!

CATHLEEN: So how did you end up with the picture frame image?

PEMASTUDIO: Well, certainly we’re all so familiar with the typical “family photo” in a lovely frame where everyone’s smiling and happy looking; yet if you know the family, you know that there’s more going on behind the shot—some degree of frustration or dissatisfaction or unease and sometimes worse. Even if you don’t know the family, based on your own experience, you just know that there are myriad layers of experiences, emotion, and mental states going on behind the glossy finish. Despite all that, the family photo, no matter how clichéd, is such the universal metaphor for the actual family. As we’d said earlier, somehow the photo of my grandma and her children stuck with me throughout our process. Then somehow, intuitively, we decided to just pull the photo out, to represent that something was there and is no longer, and yet what’s left can’t necessarily be articulated implicitly. Does that make sense?

CATHLEEN: And by putting the title inside the frame, you bring about the whole thing — yes, a frame that holds a family together, but there’s no family there, and yet still a frame — a hope — that it can be held together in some way.

PEMASTUDIO: That’s exactly what we were thinking….

CATHLEEN: We’re really happy with the jacket. THANK YOU!

Thank you to Pema Studio for the great jacket and speaking to us on how it came about.