Beautiful Books: A chat with Kilby Smith-McGregor, designer of Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead

In this edition of Beautiful Books, designer and “reluctant maximalist” Kilby Smith-McGregor walks us through the cover design process for Erina Smith’s collection of poetry Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead (Wolsak & Wynn).

The cover of Trading Beauty Secrets of the Dead by Erina Harris. The cover features the painting In the Dark by Dana Hoist, showing a small girl holding her knees in a floral wallpapered room next to a couple of exotic birds. The painting appears to spill out of its frame, and is set against a wildly coloured sky with some clouds near the bottom of the cover.

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Sometimes I call myself a reluctant maximalist. This project reminded me that although I deeply admire great minimalist design, my own bent toward a (hoped-for) Divine chaos of competing aesthetics is not really that reluctant. I am a sucker for texture and collage elements, and might go so far as to consider photocollage illustration my specialty.

The full, final cover of Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead and an inset of Dana Holst's painting In the Dark, which shows a small girl sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees next to some exotic birds, smiling off into the distance. The inset reads: "In the Dark by Dana Holst (oil on linen on panel, 10x8", 2009, private collection). Courtesy of the artist.

Erina was passionate from the beginning that the cover of Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead feature a striking painting, entitled In the Dark, by Dana Holst. The publishing team and I agreed that the piece was a perfect complement to the collection’s dark-yet-playful sensibility, and the texture of the oil paint on linen gave the piece a wonderful warmth. I loved the saturated colour and competing patterns, the details of the dead bird and classic saddle shoes.

Usually, when I’m asked to design a cover featuring an existing artwork or illustration, the piece in question becomes a full background image and the nuance of the composition plays out in typographical and image cropping choices.

In this case, however, the author requested a cover in the vein of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—specifically, a cover with the painting enclosed within the frame and the text appearing outside the image. In addition to Autobiography of Red, the design brief included Carson’s Plainwater and the British cover of The Beauty of the Husband

The covers of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Plainwater, and The Beauty of the Husband. The caption reads: From the design brief: some iconic Anne Carson covers of the 90s-2000s.

I’m a Carson fan, but I do sometimes find her work cold, and the archetypical Carson cover of the 90s–2000s plays up that coldness with exacting minimalism. While possessing a kinship to Carson’s work in many ways—heady, wry, allusive, taxonomic—Harris’s verse strikes me as having a warmer, more expansive humour and sense of play. This collection, in particular, delves into the history of children’s toys and nursery rhymes in dialogue with feminine labour and subjectivity.

I was an old school collage artist before I ever designed anything on a computer, so if there’s an emphasis on the physical and handmade in the text, I will always want to foreground those elements in the cover design.

The design of Harris’s first poetry collection, The Stag Head Spoke, by Natalie Olsen of Kisscut Design tapped into a similar “material” vibe with its ripped wallpaper cover. Being in conversation with the design world of an author’s previous books, where appropriate, is also something I enjoy. For inspiration from my own previous projects, I referenced a whimsical middle school chapter book (which incorporated a custom illustration) and booklet in the style of a French school cahier created for a theatre production.

The cover of Erina Harris' previous collection The Stag Head Spoke, and two other examples: Emily and the Deepest Memory by Noel McLellan, and a Cahier for the production of Gertrude and Alice.

I think editor Paul Vermeersch hit the nail on the head for the vision of Beauty Secrets’ design when he suggested “For the feel of the book, let’s imagine a book of Victorian verses that has travelled through time.” He encouraged me to “pay homage to that era, but subvert it by modernizing it, or even by post-modernizing it.” I was also given the liberty to break from the Carson colour palette.

I began researching vintage paper and wallpaper, and then became obsessed with the overwrought textures of marbled book binding papers. Beyond that I was looking to introduce tension with digital pixelation or contemporary materials, and choice of palette (hits of something neon-ish?). When I discovered an ornate historical frame in a decidedly a-historical powder pink hue, I knew I had to try it. The frame looked to me as though it had come off a 3D printer, a level of uncanniness I appreciated.

Six marbled paper textures, with the caption: "Marbled-paper textures, reminiscent of classic bookbinding papers as well as vintage fabrics and wallpapers.
A series of six textures with the caption: "Empty sky, tech and glitch-inspired textures, ornate ornamental frame in an unusual colour."

The final affront to the minimalism of those initial Carson covers was perhaps the eventual decision to have the painting melt out of the frame into the text below. The cover is a little extra. That’s her prerogative, I say.

Does anything of the original Carson minimalism remain? I don’t know. Ultimately, a blank sky won out against the marbled paper texture. It provided a greater contrast to the painting, and I do believe there is an expansive spacial quality captured in the free-floating frame, hung in the sky, that shares an affinity with those initial comp designs.

What matters in the end is that the author was “over the moon” with the end result on this one. That my inner maximalist design monster also had a field day, was a welcome byproduct of the process. Thanks for your trust and enthusiasm, Erina. And a big thanks to Noelle, Paul, and Ashley at Wolsak & Wynn for the guidance, collaboration, and the opportunity to put another beautiful book out into the world.

Three cover drafts for Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.
Three more cover drafts for Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.

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Kilby Smith-McGregor is a writer and graphic designer living in Toronto.