Book Cover: To Jones

I lobbied for this one. 

Generally book cover jobs come to me, not the other way around, but when I found out my friend, writer Shannon Brazil, had signed a contract with Limit Zero for her novel To Jones, a book that I have known and loved for years as she wrote and rewrote and edited it in our writing group The Gong Show,  I knew I just had had had to design its cover.

To Jones is a beautifully written, funny, emotional, very sexy novel. The official publisher description says it best:

Sex-starved wife and overwhelmed mother, Joanna O’Malley, a.k.a. Jones, sets out on a solo road trip with a one-time hall pass to have sex outside of her marriage. From Portland, through the spectacular Oregon Outback, to Black Rock City, Nevada, the largest temporary art community in the world, comes a story of personal revolution, aftermath, and the long-term dynamics that can keep a couple together or tear them apart.

To Jones is a love song wrapped in a reckoning; an exploration of expectation versus reality, sacrifice versus compromise, anger versus compassion, and suffocation versus resuscitation. It is about everyday people coming to terms with who they are to one another and choosing whether it is better to live by societal constructs or redefine the terms of their marriage. One size does not fit all.

I was overjoyed when the publisher said I could have the job. And I loved the design concept they and Shannon had been discussing: the silhouette of a female body, its shape filled with the vista of a desert road. The concept felt quite sexy. The body, yes, but also the way the shape would interact with the landscape that filled it. I could already see in my mind the road's center line delineating the legs. I already knew how I could make good use of the positioning of the sun.

I should pause here and mention a couple things. First, when I was signed on to design To Jones, it didn't even quite have a title yet. It was probably going to be called To Jones, but there was also some back-and-forth with an alternate title, Jones Burning. Fire and flame are meaningful metaphors in the book, and in fact even if no whiff of burn got into the title, Limit Zero was interested in me experimenting with finding a place in the cover art to add a flame or fire. So that was another element for me to keep in mind as I experimented.

And another thing I needed to keep in mind was the branding of publisher Limit Zero. All LZ books have the title and author name in the same spot, in the same font, in the same size. It creates a framing to imagine that art in and around. 

By the way, there's some mystery around the publisher of Limit Zero. They keep their identity under wraps. You can read about that on their website here. For the purposes of my post, when talking about the back and forth I had with them during the design process, I'll just call them Limit Zero or LZ.

As I got started, I had two main tasks. One: build a desert road. Figure out my landscape, my elements (the road lines, the scrub, the mountains, the sky), decide how color and shape would best fit inside the silhouette of the body. Two: create the body. The right body, that would best fill the dimensions of the book, sit well with the Limit Zero text branding, and pair best with my desert road.

To create my vista, I Google-Earthed the area where the road trip takes place in the book. There are lots of different types of deserts, and I wanted to honor the story's desert with the details I created. Then I went into Illustrator and started to draw my scene. 

I also thought a lot about color. My landscape was going to be layers of color, and I needed those layers to balance so that I didn't have one section standing out from the rest in a way it shouldn't. Color can sometimes be quite a puzzle to work out in a design. I played with reds, pinks, purples. Sunrise/sunset colors, to go logically with where I wanted the sun in the sky—not to mention how evocative those colors are. But I also thought about desert mid-day colors, hot and dusty. Maybe I could experiment with putting the sun higher, depending on the body or bodies I came up with.

For the body, I figured I'd experiment with some different figures to see what worked best with the desert road. I Googled around to find a few photos I could draw my body shape from.

I'm always surprised at how difficult it can be to do an image search and find what you want. And I wasn't limited by copyright or model releases or anything for this project. I wasn't going to reproduce a photograph or even create art using the features of a photograph. I could use any image I found, to base my silhouette on. Even then, with a universe of bodies at my fingertips (sounds dirty), it still took a while. 

I drew out some silhouettes, from simple torso to fuller body.

One of the big issues was arms. I could find a photo I liked of a woman in a position I liked, but turn it into a silhouette, and the arms looked blobby and undefined. Or even if the silhouette looked nice, no matter what position the arms were in, they tended to distract from the vista and the road. 

I created a layout where I liked the figure and a lot of how it interacted with the landscape, but bits of the road turned her hands into inexplicable half gloves.

I tried lifting the arms and I liked the sense of movement and energy in that, but it left a question of what the body was doing and why.

As I experimented, I found that my favorite silhouette was the simplest. Just a torso, starting on top at the edge of the breasts and running down the page, over the curve of the hips, tapering down into the legs, and stopping there. This iteration of the body/road combo felt sly. I liked how the shape became abstract. Is it a body or is it not? Is it a vase? At times, especially when I played with a dark color for the background, it felt like looking through a keyhole. It was what was inside—the lines of the road, the placement of the sun—that defined the body.

I was really zeroing in on reds as the colorway, allowing that sun to blaze. Remembering Limit Zero's request that I include an element of fire or flame, I went one step further.

It was becoming a little on the nose, but I liked the way the tiny flame licking up from the sun seemed to define a navel.

Feeling adventurous with my play at innuendo, I went even one step further.

I gathered up these latest three, alongside a set with yellow backgrounds, and sent them off to LZ for a look. They liked the torso-no-flame version and came back with suggestions for variations. They were interested in seeing what the design would look like with a black background. In pinks and purples. With different font colors. With a risograph texture.

I guess you can't see the texture in the above. Here are a few details.

Can you even really see the texture there? Ah well, this old blog. 

It was fun in particular to experiment with the riso look, something I'd never tried before. In the end Limit Zero and Shannon chose the simpler version, no texture, in the original reds. I was happy with that choice. I liked the pink-purple-blue combo that was in the running when they'd narrowed their choices down to three, but I liked the reds best because the sun in the center just blazes, which feels most fitting with the burn of emotion and sexuality throughout the book. 

To Jones comes out in March of 2027. More info on Shannon is here, and you have to check out the cool website for Limit Zero here. And for a little taste, here's an excerpt!

*

That last descending stretch of Route 26 before it broke from Mount Hood and onto the wide-open high desert of Oregon was windows down, music loud. And I’ll confess something else right now, only because it was a total shuffle-coincidence, but the first song I heard on the other side of the mountain was “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael. And I have to tell you, with the horizon in front of me, the sun in the sky, the wind in my hair, it was the perfect song, the only song. A childhood anthem that choked me up in spite of myself. 

Because everything that needed to come loose in me, my shoulders, my wrists, the giant ball sockets of my hips, broke free during that song. I pulled out the ponytail, shook my hair free. Right hand on the wheel, left hand out the window, fingers spread wide. I yelled into the wind, to the heavens above. 

“Thank you, George Michael!” 

If it was a midlife crisis I was having, this was the moment I decided to own my shit.