Andrew Davis on Designing Plain Bad Heroines
Andrew Davis is a designer and illustrator at HarperCollins. He lives in London. Here he tells us about designing the cover for Plain Bad Heroines.
When I began reading Plain Bad Heroines, I couldn’t wait to get started on designing the cover. It’s a funny and clever American Gothic novel with a queer twist, and I’d never read anything like it before.
The book takes us to 1902, at an all girl’s boarding school in Rhode Island, where students Flo and Clara are madly in love with each other, as well as completely obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane, a scandalous debut memoir. A copy of the book is found splayed in the woods near the two girls’ dead bodies after a horrific wasp attack. Within five years, The Brookhants School for Girls is closed. But not before three more people died on the property, each in a troubling way.
Over a hundred years later, Brookhants hits the news when writer Merritt Emmons publishes a book on the queer history surrounding the ‘haunted’ school and that book is about to be adapted into a controversial horror film. And as the filming begins, the past and present become grimly entangled.
The team wanted a jacket that was cool and contemporary, rather than a look that leaned towards the early twentieth century timeline. With this in mind, I began to think about what the poster for the film in the book would look like. Something loud, bold and disruptive – but something that hinted at the humour in the book, too.
I began with some rough sketches to shape my ideas. The wasp attack is a big focus in the plot, so I knew the jacket had to feature or embody them in some way – either through colour (yellow and black), or through imagery. I played with ideas of wasp swarms, of stripes, and of blackletter typography, which I thought could hint at the historical angle as well as feeling disruptive and a bit horror. I decided this would be an illustrative or typographic cover, so I didn’t do any photographic research and dived straight into Photoshop to begin illustration.
First I tried a blackletter typographic option, which used an existing typeface that I amended, adding wings and stripes to feature the wasp. Next I wanted to realise the wasp swarm idea, and had an image in my head of wasps swarming over the title. For this I needed a bold and chunky typeface with enough of a surface area to be legible with wasps crawling all over it. When I found ‘Le Mans’, a typeface inspired by the sportscar event, I knew it could work in this context. It’s chunky and rectangular, bold and loud, and it fills space well. I love the projects that allow you to work with a really great title, and I was so happy with how big ‘BAD’ could be on the cover (reinforcing the meaning of the word a little, too). I paired this with ‘Benguiat’, a typeface I love for its associations with the horror genre in books and film – as well as its feature in the Stranger Things title sequence.
I wasn’t too happy with how the swarm idea worked out, so I moved on to illustrating the wasp for covers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 – all the same idea with different type and treatments. It wasn’t until after I did these that I returned to the Le Mans type cover, removed the sticky black substance and experimented with stamping the wasp onto the ‘A’ in ‘BAD’, an idea that came at random. The shape of the letter, as well as its central position on the cover, worked so well with the shape of the wasp. Then I tried a couple of approaches with a blackletter font called ‘Lordish’, which at the time were a couple of my favourite approaches.
At the cover art meeting, most people felt that the last two options were perhaps too disruptive for the target reader, but that the second option, now the final cover, had exactly the balance they were looking for. With some adjustments to the cover review and author name, this is the cover we decided to use. I was really happy with how it printed, too, with such vivid 100% yellow and magenta inks, and with spot uv over the letters and wasp. The typographic route meant we could also have some fun with the messaging on the book proofs.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.