Designing a Cover for The Salmon People

When Whitecap decided to republish Hugh McKervill's 1967 classic The Salmon People our designers had a challenging task in trying to update the look of the book while reflecting McKervill's original history.

Designing a new cover is always a process, and there are usually a few attempts before we get one that feels right. In this installment of the Whitecap blog designer Andrew Bagatella walks us through a few of the cover designs he tried out before arriving at the final design for the book.

First, here's the original cover.

The cover that went with the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book looks quite outdated today and is a little confusing.

Here is Andrew's first idea for a new cover for the book.

Andrew says, "I love the simplicity of the black and white illustration, but I felt like the book might get lost or overlooked on bookstore shelves."

His second version was a little more colourful.

Andrew: "In my second attempt I wanted to try something more playful and type heavy, but our art director felt the title was unreadable, so we needed to try something new."

The third and final version combines some of the playfulness of the second cover with beautiful illustrations.

"For the final cover I found these really cool salmon illustrations that allowed me to create a path for the title and author's name to flow into."

That's our design team's take on how we choose a new cover for The Salmon People by Hugh Mckervill. Of course, it also reflects Whitecap's love of putting fishtails on covers. What can we say? Nature's a great designer.

The Salmon People will be released this summer.