Beci Kelly Gets Kaleidoscopic for The Mad Women's Ball
Beci Kelly is a London based Illustrator/Designer, currently working as Head of Design, Doubleday at Penguin Random House - Transworld. Here she takes us through the fascinating journey of the creation of The Mad Women’s Ball.
This was an absolute corker of a brief to work on, a slightly fantastical and macabre story, set in the 19th century, with plenty of gothic and surreal imagery to draw from. It was one of those books that I was always itching to set aside everything else and work on. From the first time it was briefed, to the finishing the last page of the manuscript my brain was buzzing with ideas and motifs.
First of all, I was enchanted by the idea of the asylum itself, and the concept of this annual ball where the women patients, deemed mad or hysterical, and whom had been outcast from society, were suddenly the object of the Parisian elite’s desires and obsessions. Dressed up in ballgowns as dazzling and hypnotic as the women wearing them, for the purposes of discriminatory entertainment.
I knew the cover had to be sumptuous, rich in colour and would probably benefit from lots of intricate gold foil detail. But I also wanted to play around with optical illusions and allude to the hypnotic nature of watching these beautiful creatures, as well as hinting towards Dr Charcot’s practices of hypnotism as a form of therapy on these women. I set about looking at optical illusions and static imagery that deceived the eye or gave a somewhat dizzying effect. An optical illusion is infact described as ‘the experience of seeming to see something which does not exist or is other than it appears’ which, given that there is a lot of paranormal themes to the novel, worked rather well on that level also.
But I knew I wanted something more monochromatic and pared back, so as not to completely draw focus or look too garish in colour etc. So, I started to look at imagery that still tricked your vision but was completely comprised of black and white colouration...
This in turn got me thinking about the ballroom tiles themselves, where the women of the hospital would dance in their finery, and how often this is checkerboard style pattern, almost like a large chess board. This gave a very striking and stirring effect which was equally as trippy to gaze at - the type of pattern that you end up seeing everywhere after looking at it for too long, so you can imagine how many migraines this project caused me, dedication to the cause I say! I started to play around with ideas and dreamed big of printing underneath the jacket straight to boards for the hardback look or even having a double cover for the paperback, which would then feature a die cut circle to reveal just a glimpse of the overall piece. In the end die cut was not to be, but the hardback does include a large-scale ballroom pattern as detailed below.
In terms of the rest of the jacket design, with all those other symmetrically balanced motifs, I was heavily inspired by kaleidoscopes, having gone down the rabbit hole of looking at magic and distortion. I also felt inspired by the notion of the wealthy onlookers peering through binoculars at the women, and so this also made me consider kaleidoscopes and their optical appearance.
After much exploration into this concept using full bleed images, I began to think about what this would look like if I used numerous objects and images. I started to collate lots of the imagery and motifs that I had been jotting down whilst reading the novel – such as candelabra, mirrors, gloves, fans etc – and this produced a rather arresting look.
When working with the images of the women in their gowns, I knew I wanted them to be faceless, or even headless, not only because I often think it’s better to leave these things to the imagination of the reader, but also to nod to the idea that they had ‘lost her head/mind’. This was also rather symbolic, as the figures were then devoid of all personality and character, just as in the spectators in the story would like them to be, silent but beautiful. Seen but not heard...
Lastly, I then needed to combine the two ideas; both the collated kaleidoscope effect array of images, as well as the ballroom floor inspired optical illusion. This took a great deal of time and care to get right and was a fairly painstaking task of making sure everything lined up and mirrored perfectly.
Could really have done with that new little symmetry feature back then!! SIGH!
After a few back-and-forth’s at the covers meeting in terms of which typeface to go for, we landed on the final look of the sans serif to break through the very period based historical imagery and give it a modern twist.
This was a true joy to work on and it has been wonderful seeing the reaction to this glorious book and the happily the cover itself, since publication. It has been supported also by the Netflix movie adaptation featuring Mélanie Laurent, which is also marvellous... but read the book first ;). I feel very lucky to have worked on this publication, and many thanks to Vyki and the team at Spine for asking me to talk more about it, it’s been great to recount it all here.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.