Creating the book cover
The elegantly simple and clean graphics for the jacket cover were created by the UK publishers, Bodley Head (Random House), to resemble the emergency cabinets for escape tools or fire alarm buttons. The designer, Kris Potter, did a sterling job with this, and actually built a bright red box complete with safety glass front and emergency hammer to photograph.
Perhaps less glamorously than you might have thought, the photo-shoot was actually set-up in the underground car park of the publishing house’s offices near Vauxhall Bridge, the book cabinet screwed to the whitewashed basement wall. (You can see on the left-hand side where the cover for Roddy Doyle’s new novel, The Guts, was created.) Kris was also kind enough to produce an animated gif of the entire creative process, which has a fabulous stop-motion-capture feel to it – watch here.
A fitting epigraph for the messy aftermath of the apocalypse: “Cleaning in Progress”…
