Literature for a multi-format world

A great book cover needs to do three important jobs. Firstly, it needs to be beautiful. A book is judged by its cover and so the cover needs to be visually enticing. Secondly, it needs to hint at what is contained within, without giving too much away. Lastly, it needs to capture the essence and tone of the writing, which is intangible and comes through in the overall feel of the design.

The Park is a novel with the undertone of a psychological thriller. The cover design illustrates the main subject of the story, with a sense of foreboding introduced by the empty swing and acid colours. The book is written in a personal, conversational style and the handwritten text on the cover speaks to this.

The page design of a book requires a different approach. It should relate to the cover but needs to be invisible for easy, focused reading. For The Park we used a classic serif font for the main text. We used the handwritten text on the cover for the personal, handwritten notes in the book. And we designed a park-bench icon as a text divider, to carry through the theme and add visual interest.

Translating a crafted paper-page design to digital formats is always a challenge, because design cannot be perfectly controlled in the reflowable text of different ereading apps. Here, we keep the text design flexible and classically simple, while retaining the design integrity of the product across formats by using the park-bench text divider.

Since we use a single-master workflow, where all formats are produced from one source, we can produce all formats of the book simultaneously, with no need for post-production ebook-conversion. Read more about our workflow here.