Pete Adlington on Designing Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and The Sun
Pete Adlington is a Senior Designer for Faber & Faber. Here he takes us through his process for designing Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and The Sun.
I really enjoy designing books for debut authors. There’s a lot to be said for having a clean slate both in terms of expectation and visual language. Being briefed on the new book for Kazuo Ishiguro places you firmly in the opposite camp with massive expectation on all departments to deliver the new bestseller. Unusually, the lead time was very generous, with the manuscript being slid over a pub table for us to read well over a year before the March 2021 publication date. I say “us” because the whole team was briefed to produce visuals initially. I’ll only focus on my contributions here but let me say that what was produced by the others was exquisitely beautiful and shattered my self-confidence.
Klara and The Sun follows the lifespan of Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) built to be a companion to children. We accompany Klara from the shop she begins her life in, through her time with her family and the young girl she is charged with befriending and beyond. Narrated from Klara’s point of view, we see humanity through the mind of a machine that quietly observes humans and tries to produce some logic from the unpredictable nature of our relationships and actions. The Sun acts both as Klara’s fuel source, recharging her solar cells, and as a kind of illusive deity whom she looks to for signs to guide her actions when she feels stuck.
The brief was fairly open, some passages were drawn out for tone but on the whole it felt like a “do what you feel is right, just make sure it looks like a bestseller” sort of situation. The need for a cover direction that would transfer seamlessly to a large marketing campaign was also a priority on the brief. I’d usually skim over this but with the size of the campaign that Klara would undoubtedly have meant that I did try to work in a way that gave something that could be lifted from the cover and given its own life.
Klara’s eyesight works differently to a humans in that it segments the world into squares of different sizes to focus on points of interest. Looking at a human face she might see an eye repeated in increasing sizes of magnification across her vision. I wanted to take this and use it as a device to depict something familiar in semi-abstraction. Being a simple man I chose the sun, something ubiquitous and instantly relatable to all ably sighted humans.
This route was liked in-house but quite swiftly rejected by Ish as the sun motif slid too close to the Rising Sun of the Japanese flag, something he strongly wanted to avoid.
The second route saw me bringing in an obscured figure to move in a more emotive direction. The fragmenting of vision is still used in some of these and I also started concealing a face within sunbursts, the idea that Klara’s life is steered by the appearance and disappearance of the sun.
What would become the final cover also makes an entrance here. It is effectively a simplified version of the first round but with a single square to allow the sun to hide. As is suggested in the title, the sun is a character in Klara’s life; she seeks it out for guidance and the question of whether it will appear or not gives it a playfulness that I felt this route could embody. It could be both a single panel of Klara’s vision or a very naïve depiction of the sun peeking around a window.
Both the clean, sunburst visuals and the red one were taken forward a stage, removing the title from the window meant that it felt more like you were looking through the book. I have to say at this point that I thought the more elegant portrait shots would gain approval. But the force and simplicity of the red image left nobody in doubt as to which one they could see working in the shops and online.
The next stage meant a mandatory 'colourway' selection which was quite a pleasing thing to do in the end. I remember doing something similar in university in response to Josef Albers’ colour theories, only now I was getting paid to do it rather than accruing massive debt.
One thing that I strongly disliked about the red cover was its clean, digital lines. The book, like much of Ish’s work, is really warm in tone and much of the narrative involves children. I decided to recreate all the elements in a painterly style so there were no clean lines or flat colour, the background and the typography was given texture and this in turn gave it a naivety that made it feel like a kid might have painted it. It also created a nightmare in terms of the book’s production, (thanks to Senior Production Manager Jack Murphy for meeting me in Brockwell Park with colour proofs over lockdown.)
The red was still the strongest but this exercise gave me material for endpapers as well as special editions and heavily influenced the extensive marketing campaign that extended to fancy proofs, massive posters, light displays, animations, t-shirts, biscuits…
As seems to be increasingly the case these days, a backlist revamp came off the back of designing the new title and Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day fell in line with a paperback adapt of the hardback route, with more titles to follow very soon.
I look at the design for Klara and The Sun now we are edging back in into the world and its constricted view of the outside seems to have taken on a different significance. It feels like a wholly appropriate cover to have designed in lockdown . . . but then I’ve not had much else to do but overthink things recently. It’s just a square and a semi-circle at the end of the day.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.