PROCESS
I decided initially to create a visual around the word "flotsam" and weave "interpreter" into the plot of the book itself. I began to envision all kinds of constructions made out of eroded trash and carved driftwood; my goal was to create something with a sense of history and neglect. I settled on the storyline of Jimmy Rogers, a hoarder of sea debris who starts coming upon waste that's a lot more sinister than what he is used to on his nightly walks along the beach.
These are some images from early explorations in different media. After this stage of discovery I decided I had refined my storyline enough to venture down to the riverfront and see what materials I could gather. I found interesting driftwood and lots of gritty textures that captured the feeling I wanted, but struggled to create a compelling composition in the vertical format while keeping the text legible. Though I felt unsatisfied with the my on-site explorations, my trip did reaffirm that I wanted to utilize the river in some way. I took the opportunity to collect a large bag of miscellaneous trash. This would eventually make up the meat of my final product.
I started to think about the way that collectors display their treasures and got the image of an old wooden cabinet of curiosities with spots for things of all shapes and sizes. Using scrap material from the wood-shop, I constructed a faux box around the objects I had found. I left space for someone to place their head, the final "object" that Jimmy finds as he walks along the shore.
I stained the wood to give it an older, shipwrecked feel and expanded the visual language of the cover into the rest of the book jacket. I decided to paint the title onto a piece of caution tape I'd collected at the river as another allusion to the darkness of the plot.
Next began a series of revisions. The angle of the head in the first full draft didn't hold the illusion of sitting in the box and the spine felt cramped and drew emphasis away from the cover. The second attempt integrated the person in a far more successful way but lacked the lifelessness that was so essential to the storyline. This was solved with a lot of eyeshadow and a water fountain. The new carving on the spine kept some of the rough feeling of my experiments at the waterfront but needed some fine tuning to fit the rest of the image. From there the piece retained the same basic framework but benefitted greatly from minor edits to text justification, tracking, margins and weight to give it a polished feel. I felt the end result was a nice combination of precious and chilling, exemplary of the story it sought to represent.
