My cover design for Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is inspired by the central relationship of the novel, the friendship between Lila and Elena. 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.
