Jump to:
Tom, himself a cartoonist, came to the meeting with an idea for what would become the first of four potential covers: a lump of dog vomit with an American flag poking out. He wanted the cover to be simple, iconic, and convey the novel’s humor.
Sketch 1
I thought the idea of “defacing” an otherwise serious-looking cover could be an effective way of displaying the foreign-affairs subject matter while signaling the novel’s satirical tone. In order for the joke to land, though, the tonal contrast had to be significant. To this end, I rendered the text in a stately serif with wide tracking. I also made use of small caps and decorative glyphs, namely the stars to space lines of text.
While this idea would make a strong cover – it was simple, iconic, and satirical – we thought it has two significant faults. One, its color scheme signals domestic U.S. politics, not international relations. Two, it doesn’t show that the book is a narrative. The cover could just as well be that of a tell-all memoir from a former White House staffer – not at all the genre of “Dog’s Breakfast”. We thought we could do better.
The second sketch uses a motif from the novel, a spray-painted goat, as the “defacing” element. Haphazardly slapped over a type treatment reminiscent of a staid diplomatic memo, the spray painted image conveys the novel’s irreverence. What this cover idea delivers in punchiness, though, it lacks in clarity of message. Is that supposed to be a goat, or a dog?, we imagined readers wondering. It, like the first sketch, also didn’t signal the novel’s international subject matter. We decided to move on.
The third sketch took a more abstract approach. Rather than focus on a single image, the cover would feature several smaller motifs from the novel: a bomb and an olive branch to signal diplomacy, a rat similar to the one on Vodania’s national flag, and stars to evoke the United States flag. The interwoven collage-like composition served to convey the competing interests of the characters in the novel, and the chaos their interaction produces.
While this idea is in improvement over the first two in certain respects – it signals more clearly the international element of the novel’s subject and is generally more beautiful – this sketch was clearly missing the element of humor that Tom needed the final cover to have. For that reason, we decided against this concept.
The final sketch shows an anonymous politician walking across a warm earth-toned landscape in dramatic lighting. In the final version though, he will have stepped in some green muck (perhaps dog vomit?) and will have unwittingly tracked it across the cover.
The strengths of this cover were immediately apparent. The suit-walking-in-shadows trope would connote political mystery, while the muck the figure unwittingly trailed behind him would qualify any self-seriousness the subject matter would connote.
In order to get the concept across to Tom without access to my drawing tablet, I used generative AI to create thumbnail images of this sketch, feeding the following prompt into DreamStudio:
“vector image, shot from a steep angle above, of a man in a black suit walking toward the camera across a red floor, man has beige mush on his shoe and there is a trail of beige mush footprints behind him”
Beyond this point, I used no generative AI.
I wanted to emulate the style of Karolis Strautniekas for the cover illustration. His grainy textures and chiaroscuro lighting recall film noir and evoke mystery and drama – perfect for Dog’s Breakfast. Clean lines and shapes render his work clear (and trendy) enough to sell on bookstore shelves.
I don’t have a background in digital illustration, so I consulted some of his work-in-progess posts on Behance before creating a sketch of the general composition and lighting.
From there, I laid down undertones and refined lines and shapes.
Typography and Layout
With the illustration finished, I moved on to the jacket design.
The composition of the illustration directs the viewer’s eye downward, so I knew I needed most of the text to be at the bottom of the cover.
I experimented with some off-kilter designs to reflect the wry humor of the novel, but those ended up looking too much like magazine layouts. Instead, the layouts that featured the text directly over the illustration set the mystery-thriller tone most effectively.
For the primary typeface, I wanted something vaguely soviet with subtle organic qualities. The title screen for the HBO show Chernobyl drew me to Facile Sans. In mockups, though, the typeface felt too wide and was too aesthetically dissimilar to the typefaces of comparable mystery novels.
To complement the narrow geometric letters of the title font, I wanted a monospaced slab serif font as the secondary typeface. Such a typewriter-style font would be reminiscent of the low-brow mysteries I was trying to recall.
I discovered TT2020, a typeface that features nine versions of each glyph in order to reflect the irregularities that typewriters produced even when striking the same key.
I kerned the text on the back cover to mimic the imperfections of an actual typewritten letter from the 1940s.