Book covers for Édouard Louis

For the course 'Impactful Book Cover Design' by John Gall, I created this series of covers for novels by French author Édouard Louis. Louis's oeuvre details his youth, growing up as a gay boy in a poor, working-class family, and wrestling his way out of the vicious circle of poverty, violence and humiliation.

Apps:
Adobe Photoshop and InDesign

Photography:
Unsplash

The design process starts with reading the book and making notes. I noted everything that stood out to me; both recurring themes and visuals (events, places etc.) that struck me.

Based on my notes, I started sketching. I generated a number of concepts focusing on different themes, events and images from the story. As you can see from the sketches below, I really gravitated towards themes of anger, violence and feeling unseen.

After sketching, I took the most promising ideas to the computer. I developed three directions: two focusing on the violence and anger themes and one zooming in on the feeling of parental disapproval and feeling unseen. The latter felt most promising, especially after I found this striking photograph of the shadow of a man (has he turned his back to the viewer?) on concrete stairs. This photograph sparked the idea of using shadow as the theme for the entire cover series, because Louis's books generally deal with his past, which often seems to still loom over him.

Louis's writing style is very urgent and matter-of-factly, which at first led me to rather heavy-handed approaches. Ultimately, I decided that a more classic cover layout would do this book and Louis's other works more justice. I used the shadow photograph introduced before, but cropped it more dramatically and added a colored for the type.

I decided on a combination of Thermal VF for the title and Brandon Grotesque for the author name.

I selected some more shadow photographs for two other books; 'Changer: Méthode' and 'En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule'. The former details the ways in which Louis tried to escape the poverty of his working-class background by relentlessly absorbing culture and consciously planning to move up the social ladder. The latter centers around Louis's original name and his former self, from which he feels now detached.

The colors picked for each cover reflect the subject matter; red-orange for the violence and anger in 'Qui à tué mon père', a violet for the attempts at sophistication in 'Changer: Méthode' and a dark grey for the death of the former self in 'En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule'.