Cover Designer Spotlight: Sophie Harris

By Megan Coote, Erin Martínez Hazlett and Liv Harrison

Sophie Harris has previously worked as a designer at Penguin Random House UK and Little, Brown Book Group and is currently a Senior Designer at Faber & Faber. If you’re a bookshop regular, you’ll likely recognise several of Sophie Harris’ iconic covers. She has worked on a variety of projects, including the redesign of Banana Yoshimoto's back catalogue, that involved creating fresh, visually appealing covers retaining the essence of Yoshimoto's work while attracting new readers. Her design approach often includes exploring different artistic styles, such as illustration and photography. You can find more of Sophie’s colourful, eye-catching work on her book cover design Instagram here.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

A notable cover Sophie Harris has worked on is the design for Claire Kohda’s novel Woman Eating, published by Virago Press, which beautifully encapsulates the essence of the novel. The story follows Lydia, a vampire grappling with her thirst for human blood while striving to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Themes of isolation, the search for belonging and the intersection of heritage and identity are woven throughout the novel.

The cover is both intriguing and minimalist, featuring the popular trend of fruit imagery on book cover designs in recent years. The apple is an apt choice as it traditionally symbolises temptation, reflecting Lydia’s struggle with her vampiric desires and the forbidden nature of her blood craving. The veiny appearance of the apple adds an unsettling edge, symbolising life and blood which are central elements to the vampire theme. This detail gives the book a darker, more horror-driven edge.

The bold, contemporary lettering, by illustrator Ulla Puggaard, stands in contrast to the minimalist feel of the cover, drawing attention to the book name and author. The design choice effectively captures the reader's attention and highlights the novel's compelling themes in a subtle manner.

Weirdo by Sara Pascoe

Comedian Sara Pascoe’s debut novel Weirdo, follows Sophie, an anxious, self-sabotaging woman in her early thirties. While working at her bar job in Essex, she sees the man she has long been pining for. Which, in her case, involved ruining a relationship in her pursuit of him all the way to Australia and maxing out her credit card in the process. The book follows Sophie as she embraces her second chance at love. It has all the trappings of British comedy: an off-kilter, dry sense of humour, darker underlying themes and a flawed – and often relatable – main character, but it also flips reader’s preconceptions as the narrative takes one unexpected turn after another.

Illustrated by Sofie Birkin, the cover for Weirdo encapsulates the existential musings of its protagonist. The woman on the cover has a duvet wrapped tightly around her, with only her face and her hairy toes peeking out, adding a touch of humour while communicating her anxiety about being observed, the overwhelming nature of modern life and her feelings of isolation. This is one of Sophie Harris’s more statement-focused and minimalist covers, where one illustration and a block-coloured background do the trick. The colours Harris chose for it, a moss green background and salmon pink for the title, contrast beautifully as complementary colours. She repeated this technique in the paperback version of the cover as well, combining bright yellow and purple tones.

The design for the title is extremely considered and worth noting. Sophie Harris chose playful, rounded typography for a book that represents and champions weirdos. What’s more, in matching the exact tone of pink she uses for the title lettering with the character on the original cover, she ties the textual and the visual together in an extremely clever way, letting us know without a doubt that Sophie (the protagonist) is the ‘weirdo’ the title refers to.

Kitchen, The Premonition and Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Kitchen’s release, Harris redesigned three of Yoshimoto’s most read novels, as is typically the case nowadays. The trick to both designing and redesigning a series of titles successfully, however, is to create a solid, easily replicable base, something instantly recognisable that can flow through each cover like an invisible thread. If you’ve seen Vintage’s Murakami covers or the clothbound Penguin Classics, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

In Kitchen (translated by Megan Backus), orphan Mikage moves in with her friend Yoichi and his mother Eriko after her beloved grandmother passes away. She quickly finds solace in food, cooking for her found family and navigating herself through her grief. For Mikage, the kitchen represents family, warmth and comfort; her food is a source of comfort in a time of grief, a source of love in a time of sadness. The culinary experience sits at the heart of the story, and it sits at the heart of Harris’ design. There is something magical in the mundane here. The blue purple of the setting, the eerie shadow of the tree and the absence of any dinner guests (one setting for each of an improvised family) creates an unnerving feel, of something unsaid.

In The Premonition (translated by Asa Yoneda), Yayoi, a young woman raised in a seemingly normal, middle-class family, thinks she may have forgotten something important from her childhood. As the premonition gets stronger, she opts to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino, and slowly unlocks the secrets her family has kept hidden for years.

The haziness of Yoshimoto’s writing and Yayoi’s memories finds itself in the waves of the cover design: ‘I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide as the sun went down, ending up far, far away from where I started’. How do you return to the shore when the shore has long disappeared? How do you return to something that you didn’t know to begin with? The juxtaposition of the pink and green combined with the faceless figure in the water evokes a sense of isolation, of questioning. We don’t recognise the person in the water because they cannot recognise themselves and their true identity.

In Dead-End Memories (translated by Asa Yoneda), Yoshimoto tells five stories about five different women, each one with their own recent experience of pain, trauma and betrayal. At the core of this collection, there is a profound understanding that grief is an all-consuming feeling, but there is hope to be found. As Yoshimoto writes, “there was no past, no future, no words, nothing – just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun”. In creating this autumnal scene, Harris directly relates to the source material. She captures that precious moment for us to witness. We share in this moment with the figure to the right and understand this as a moment of deep reflection and change.

In discussing her designs, Harris explains: “I chose nighttime scenes to convey the earthly yet dream-like states throughout Yoshimoto's stories. She writes about the beauty in quiet solitude, so I've illustrated lone figures and scenes not yet populated”. She artfully reflects Yoshimoto’s minimalism in her designs and yet still manages to encapsulate a recognisable feeling. The use of illustration here too allows Harris to creatively interpret these characters and their stories rather than let photographs dictate our imaginations.

Harris, in this redesign, modernises Yoshimoto’s work into what we would expect now, especially from a publisher like Faber, who are also responsible for She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: sans serif typefaces, bright colours and bold imagery. Simultaneously, there is a timelessness to these covers; you cannot place them in a year or even a period, but what they do seamlessly evoke is a sense of nostalgia. We know these moments as they’re presented to us. They’re familiar, knowable and reminiscent of our own lives. The intimacy Harris provides in her designs is stellar and it will be exciting to see what she does next.