The illustration on the cover of ‘A Foreign Education’ was created by the artist Clare Louise Mobbs. I designed the cover around the illustration, with creative and colour matching advice from Clare along the way. Here’s the story of how we reached the final design.

My initial idea for the cover was a student desk adorned with text books and beer bottles. Clare worked with that concept and created these first sketches.

I played with the title text on the covers and soon decided that the overall design was too cluttered and my initial ideas weren’t working out.

So in a quest for simplicity, I thought it best to get rid of the desk completely and focus on a few items that could get the message of the book across – America, Britain, university, drinking and womanising. Here’s my crude mock-up of the new plan, based around a couple of plastic desk flags and a downloaded dangling bra photograph (below left). Clare then worked her magic and came up with a sketch that captured the idea perfectly (below right).

I played around with another mock-up of the cover, and decided that the image was better blended into the background rather than in a standalone box.

As I was happy with the pencil sketch, Clare then produced the first colour version of the illustration (below left). We were both delighted with the results, and only decided to make a couple of minor adjustments – making the bra slightly larger and adding some whisky to the bottle and the second glass. This resulted in the final version (below right) that we both agreed was perfect.

Now it was time to start building the cover design around Clare’s illustration. I began with a couple of ideas – a plain blue background, and a ruled paper background with the ‘A’ of ‘A Foreign Education’ written like a grade on someone’s homework. They both seemed like good ideas, but I wasn’t too happy with the end results.

Clare also played around with some ideas and provided the suggestions below.

We both agreed that the yellow set off the colours of the illustration nicely, and so I worked on that as the background and tried to find a suitable font for the title. I also experimented with text on the book spines (below left). As much as I liked the colour combination, I just couldn’t bring myself to publish a book with a yellow cover, so I reverted to blue for my next attempt (below right). I also re-introduced the ruled paper as I felt that it created an effective handwritten effect when combined with the font.

At this stage I also began to think about how the spine and back cover might look, and came up with the wraparound cover design below.

Only a few minor adjustments were now required before I reached the final version. I decided to remove the text from the books spines in the illustration, as I felt they were distracting from the simplicity I was aiming for. Clare also suggested that the ‘by’ above my name should be removed, and I agreed. The red vertical ruler lines were effective when viewing the whole cover as a single flat image, but I was concerned that printing inaccuracies would mean that they would rarely line up perfectly on the edges of the spine. I therefore took them out to avoid the problem. I also re-scanned the sheet of lined paper with bit more crumpling in order to introduce some more texture to the background. Finally, I came up with the idea of using an airmail envelope to frame the text on the back cover, which I think works quite well in the final cover that you can see below.

The whole cover creation process took around 2 months from first concept to final design, and involved 48 e-mails and 39 attachments being exchanged between Clare and myself.

High quality versions of the final cover can be downloaded here:
  Wraparound (3280 x 2475 JPEG, 6.3 MB)
  Front (1500 x 2400 JPEG, 2.8 MB)