My Brilliant Friend
A book cover design for a bildungsroman set in Naples, Italy.
My cover design for Elena Ferrante’s spellbinding novel My Brilliant Friend is inspired by the relationship at its center, the friendship between Lila and Elena. In contrast to the representational images that are currently used for the Neapolitan Novels, I was interested in exploring abstraction and pull the prospective reader into Elena’s world through mysterious shape and color.
I wanted the shadows to evoke two books leaning against each other, evoking how the two characters continuously depend on one another to define their own life experiences, competing in their intellectual pursuits, pushing and pulling as they move through adolescence.
I made several thumbnail sketches and decided to move forward with the silhouette of the two books. I wanted the shapes to feel tactile and textural, so I made the books out of paper and scanned them. I played around with the composition and color. I loved the overlapping between the shapes as I felt that the tight-knit lives of the characters and their neighborhood were so central to my experience of the book.
