Book Covers, 2020

This project was for my Typography II course, and I was assigned to create three book covers based off of an author I enjoy. The author I chose is a mortician and popular Youtuber, Caitlin Doughty, who talks openly about the concept of death, and the taboo that often surrounds it. I decided the theme for my covers would be human body parts presented as food, or a dish you’d find being made in the kitchen.

The first cover was heavily influenced by the original book cover I own, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? which featured a black cat on a red background, with two human eyeballs rolling around on the back. There is definitely a lot of similarities in the attributes I chose to include in my version, however I added my own spin by putting the eyeballs into a bowl of cat food to tie into my food theme. I won’t deny the heavy inspiration made me end up with a very similar outcome, but I used this idea to sprout more concepts for the rest of my collection.

The second cover is for a book called From Here to Eternity, and this one is definitely my favorite. For this book, I centered the imagery around the word eternity. I first thought of a human organ we associate with eternity, and I think of the human heart, which we could equate with being in love forever. I thought about a food that lasts for an eternity, and I thought of how pickles last basically forever, and are commonly used when preparing for storms or disaster. So I pickled two human hearts, so they’d be together forever. On the back of the book, I put some kitchen timers to reinforce that kitchen theme, tied with the concept of time and eternity.

My final cover is for Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which talked about Doughty’s experiences as a mortician. This one I featured a set of human lungs on a baking tray, with a set of oven mitts on the back of the book. I chose to do a set of lungs as when I think about death, one of the visualizations that always stick with me is the concept of someone’s last breath before they pass away. This is something I imagine morticians may think about as well when they deal with their job; seeing the bodies that come in and the types of deaths they may have endured, and what their final breath may have felt like. Sure it may seem morbid, but that’s one of the reasons these books are so fascinating to me. They break the taboo that come with the notion of death.