Rachel Ake on Designing We Play Ourselves
Rachel Ake is a freelance graphic designer who also works at Penguin Random House. Here she takes us through her process for designing the beautifully creative cover for We Play Ourselves.
I received the manuscript for Jen Silverman’s debut novel on March 19, 2020. A point in time when I had convinced myself my brain was broken.
This was one of the first times in my career that I had the opportunity to design for an author a second time. Short story collections are usually my favorite titles to work on and Jen’s collection, The Island Dwellers, was no exception. We immediately clicked. One round of designs. A book cover miracle.
The brief for We Play Ourselves had two main takeaways: a strong association to the color yellow and “We trust Rachel.” But I didn’t trust myself. A week into the pandemic and I could barely get through a page of any book before falling back down the spiral of anxiety, depression, and existential dread. Nothing felt yellow to me.
This went on for longer than I’d care to recount. Eventually, thanks to my partner, I sought out the help I needed: leaving the city, sirens, and helicopters for breathing room in Ohio.
As deadlines loomed large, reading this book helped bring me back into myself. It was a cathartic meditation on the pitfalls of trying to make a living doing something creative. The self-doubt; the jealousy of comparison; the subjective nature of success; and what happens when we forget how to play. It brought me to tears many times, tears that I realized I had been holding in for a couple of years while slowly losing faith in myself. By the end, I was seeing the yellow.
In We Play Ourselves, Cass, a playwright who has fled NYC for LA in scandal, becomes involved in a semi-documentary about a teenage girl fight club. She loses herself in the orbit of the project until she becomes keenly aware of the toll. Cass seeks respite in her childhood home and finds her way back to the joy in creativity.
Designing this book was a breakthrough for my creative process. By embracing the work-from-home life I was able to find ways of easing my anxiety and just play around again. On breaks, I was mere steps from nature and would wander with my dog across the field that I used to traverse to elementary school.
While soaking in the sun, essentially steeping myself in yellow, one scene from the book that replayed for me was the flashpoint at the climax. It is a fierce portrayal of female rage that I loved and needed. The detail of a vase of flowers on a table really stuck with me. Another inspiration were the young women in the fight club. Jen vividly celebrates their girlhood alongside their violence and I wanted that energy on the cover.
After the first round I was asked to push the vase one just a little further and address everyone’s concerns that the sunglasses were too iconic to Lolita.
The lemon was Jen’s idea and it was the perfect way to tie everything together.
I want to thank Caitlin McKenna, Jen Silverman, and Robbin Schiff for all having faith in me.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.