Ceara Elliot on Designing Sorrowland
Ceara Elliot is a Senior Designer based in London, currently working at Penguin Random House. Here she takes us through her process for designing the vibrant cover for Sorrowland.
Sorrowland was such an exciting brief to work on and was described as a gothic, exciting, original and genre-bending novel. It is gorgeously written and explores the tangled history of racism in America. The story focuses on an albino black woman who, along with her children has to flee her home, escaping to find freedom. The journey she takes is wild, intense, dangerous and full of what makes it an incredibly brilliant book.
I was always keen to try and represent the main character of the story on the cover in a bold and confident way. Initially I wanted to focus on the albino aspect, illustrating a white but black figure, however from the guest point of view, the message was lost in translation. I also experimented with other albino iconography, which would work more metaphorically, this was fun and felt creative but perhaps not quite right.
I explored a lot with jungle and forest themes to communicate her treacherous journey as there’s something immediate about a woods that suggests peril and intrigue. I loved being able to work with rich, bold and intense colours, colours that oozed danger and lushness simultaneously.
The illustration came to me whilst I was scrolling through Pinterest, it seemed perfect and with some bold colour adjustments, felt absolutely right. I tried a variety of colour options for this specific design.
Yltimately the red silhouette came in first place, as it had the right balance of ‘goth’ and ‘beauty’. The illustrator, who comes under ‘Thing Design’ was very supportive of my colour changes to their illustration, which was such a bonus and I felt honoured to use it on this cover. A gem of a brief, and a joy to design.
Final cover
*Alternate covers are not final and were not published.