The Process of Designing a Book Cover

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

One of the targets I set myself last year was designing book covers to add to my portfolio. I’ve always been a person to judge a book by its cover, at least before reading the blurb. Some books just pop out on shelves, the colours, the type, the design. I’ve often bought a book because of how much I was drawn to the cover artwork - yes, purely for aesthetic reasons.

I created some cover artwork for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, which I found rather challenging since it is quite different to what I usually create, but I was so happy with the outcome.

In this post, I’ll share the process of creating this artwork, what inspired me and how I went about creating the final artwork. This includes sketches and a timelapse, so if this is something that interests you, please read on! I’ll be sharing more of these in the future, I’ve got one I’m currently working on .. there are robots and geese involved .. but that’s another post for another time.

Hiya! I'm Fran, I'm an illustrator and picture book maker living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Gee's Storees originally started as a quarterly newsletter and has slowly evolved into this Substack publication. Here, I share news and updates on my work, behind-the-scenes content as well as insight into my journey in the magical world of children’s publishing and illustration ✨ Hope you'll join our lovely community, I am looking forward to getting to know you!

The Aim (or in fancy design terms, the Brief)

This wasn’t a complicated one. I’ve been working on improving the storytelling within my illustrations, and I’ve found that covers are the perfect way to do it - to me, it’s essentially filtering down an entire book into 1 image that should entice the viewer to buy the book and read the story. It’s not the fanciest of briefs, but still challenging.

Reading and taking notes

The first thing I always do after deciding on what story I want to illustrate, is read the book with intention.