Leigh Hearon
The Challenge
Crime Craft
Leigh Hearon, prolific PI and author, approached GIRVIN to redesign the cover art for her cozy-crime quartet featuring the intrepid horse-trainer heroine Annie Carson. The original AI-generated art had little to do with the actual storylines, so she wanted something more artful, unique, and thoughtful to each story, along with a consistent representation of herself as an author.
The Solution
Quality control
We dove into the worlds of cozy crime, horses, and hand-made art; after trying out a few directions, we landed on the textured, hand-hewn quality of block printing. This medium allowed a sense of grounding texture for the digital media as well as providing a more simplistic and artistic representation of the story and its clues (instead of attempting toward realism) to encourage reader imagination. Along with the cover art, we designed a stamp that identified each of these books as belonging to the Annie Carson Mystery series. While developing the visual strategy for this series—for both audiobook and e-book—we also created a more identifiable naming style for Leigh for consistent use on all of her published works.
Strategy
Identity
Illustration
“
I am so grateful to you and your immensely talented creative team. Your insightfulness and intuitive ways of expressing of who I am and what I need are, in the real use of the word, awesome. Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
Thank you.”