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Cover to cover: Jennifer Lum on designing Tessa McWatt’s Higher Ed

Jennifer Lum uses a variety of illustrated images to capture the humorously frazzled quality of the characters in Tessa McWatt’s novel Higher Ed (Random House Canada)


HigherEd-1

1. The author’s previous book, Vital Signs, was about a marital crisis sparked by the wife’s life-threatening medical condition. This is quite a contrast to the humorous, stressed-out, and lovelorn tone of Higher Ed. I was initially inspired by an exchange between two characters involving a clownfish, the bright colours and distinct patterning of which seemed to embody the graphic aesthetic I was asked to produce. I zoomed in on one quadrant of the fish to create an abstract illustrated design.