Mothering Sunday is an elegant, literary and highly sensual romance that explores love and loss in conjunction with memory and fiction writing. It is short in form, but complex in its content, which is exactly what I strove to portray with this cover.
Choosing an image that was distinctly sensual, but not explicit was the main challenge of this cover. Just like the writing, I wanted it to be tasteful, but leave no doubt. Part of the trick was deciding what and how much to show. Though the original photograph was already pretty tightly cropped, I chose to crop even closer for maximum impact.
The extreme close crop I made on the image works on three levels. First, it creates intimacy with the viewer by making them feel they are physically close to the subject. However, it also creates a sense of obscurity because we cannot see the subject in full and especially because her face is obscured. This plays directly into the theme of memory, which is inherently obscure and fragmented in nature. Lastly, the image works to reflect the actual format of the book which is somewhat condensed, leaving the reader with a strong impression of the story and characters without allowing the audience to explore them at length.
Simplicity, across the board, was the key to this design. To this end, I chose "Baskerville" for all the type elements on this cover. As a bridge between the traditional and the contemporary, transitional fonts have a timelessness about them which allows them to be reminiscent of the past without feeling outdated.
Desaturating the image to black and white and raising the noise level also worked to evoke the past, which functions on two fronts. First, it evokes the past in a historical sense (acknowledging the story's setting across the 20th century). Second, the past can also refer to memory, which is where the protagonist, Jane, draws from in order to write her life's work.