Baby Cerberus
Client Wolsak & Wynn, a Canadian publisher
Project Baby Cerberus by Natasha Ramoutar
Services Book Cover Design
Year 2024
Wolsak & Wynn reached out to me with the opportunity to design Natasha Ramoutar’s poetry collection. They wanted a Cerberus puppy in at least one option, and their cover brief included the book’s themes (pop culture, mythology, and feminism) and what they wanted (“cute but dangerous, playful but literary, feminine without looking chick-lit, young and energetic”). I designed five covers that transformed their ideas into visuals.
There’s a lot of imagery and symbolism in the collection relating to threes, spirals, circles, and poppies. This geometric cover alludes to these themes.
This geometric cover goes in a different direction, still capturing many of the themes in the previous cover, while bringing in another idea from the book that deals with trying to break free of borders.
I was inspired by the poem “Tamagotchi” in the collection. The graphics allude to imagery in the book while serving as the icons on a Tamagotchi screen.
I used ASCII art for Cerberus to allude to the themes of echoes, stars, and digitality present in the collection.
THE FINAL COVER
The author decided on a new design direction—this time with an emphasis on purple, line illustration, and more options with the Cerberus silhouette vector.
Cover art sourced from Adobe Stock
On Hadley House, you can read a more in-depth analysis of my process creating this cover.
Hadley Hendrix is creative, communicative, accommodating, and professional at each step of the design process. I appreciated the mood boards she assembled for us, and the thoughtful annotations she provided with each design option. I appreciated that she was able to work from, and adjust to, multiple streams of input and feedback—from her own response to the text, my initial editorial brief, and the author’s reaction to the proposed designs—all of which culminated in a final design that works beautifully for the book.
— Paul Vermeersch | Senior Editor at Wolsak & Wynn
