Great Leaps

I designed the front cover for Great Leaps: Finding Home in a Changing China by Colin Thomas Flahive — published by Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

It was Flahive’s first book. He is American-born, moved from Colorado to southwest China, and has lived there for more than sixteen years; in Kunming he and three friends opened a café. Over a decade, Salvador’s Coffee House became home to more than fifty young women from mountain villages in the surrounding countryside — most of whom knew nothing about coffee or Western food, and who came to the city to work there and earn their independence. The book follows all of them through unlikely successes, heartbreaks and near-ruin.

Which means there are two migrations in this book, not one, and they are the same size. A man leaves Colorado for Yunnan. Fifty women leave the mountains for Kunming. They meet in a café.

The problem

The China memoir shelf has a costume, and it is red and gold, a paper lantern, a lone cyclist against a skyline, Chinese characters used as ornament rather than as language.

Beyond looking tired, that costume carries a specific danger for this book. When a Western author writes about China, a cover in that register makes the work look like a souvenir — the report of a visitor who arrived, observed, photographed and went home. Flahive’s whole claim is the opposite. He did not visit. He moved, stayed, employed people, raised a family, and treats his own migration and his employees’ as one story told from two directions.

So the cover had to hold both journeys at equal weight, and had to contain nothing that reads as a foreigner’s impression of a place he was passing through.

The inversion

The countryside sits along the bottom, right way up, grounded. The city hangs down from the top edge, inverted. That is the whole idea, and it does four things at once.

It refuses to make either place a backdrop. Both are full-bleed landscapes of equal size, meeting in the middle, so neither is the subject and neither is the setting — which is the only honest arrangement for a book where leaving the village and arriving in the city matter exactly as much as each other.

Inverting the city turns it into a reflection rather than a destination. That is what a city is to someone who has not yet moved there: an image, seen from a distance, hanging over the place you actually live. Not a location — a rumour about one.

It destabilises. A city hanging upside down is a city you could fall into. The title promises leaps, and the composition supplies the drop that makes a leap worth the word.

And there is no horizon. The two worlds do not meet at a line; they dissolve into a band of white haze. Nobody in this book crosses a clean border. They go into fog and find out what happened later.

Both landscapes are licensed stock photographs. The composite — the inversion, the meeting, the fog between them — is the design.

The birds

Migration is the book’s subject and also, conveniently, a bird word.

The birds cross the white band between the two worlds. They are the only living things on the cover and the only elements in motion, and they stand for the fifty young women who left mountain villages for a café in a city.

The reason they are better than an arrow: birds come back. Seasonal migration is a round trip, not a departure, and this is a book about people who leave home and then spend a decade working out what the word now means to them. An arrow would have declared the journey one-way and settled a question the book spends 208 pages refusing to settle.

Blacksmith put the Salvador’s staff photograph on the back of the finished book, which closes the loop by accident and better than a plan would have: the people the birds stand for are on the other side of the same cover, in matching shirts, with faces.

The title, and why it is eroded

Great Leap Forward is a phrase with a body count, and this title is quoting it deliberately. Set in a clean, confident, contemporary sans, the cover would have sounded like a slogan — the one tone a book this careful cannot afford.

The face is heavy and condensed but weathered, its edges chipped and pitted like painted signage that has stood through a few seasons of weather. That erosion is doing the work: it lets the words be large without letting them be triumphal. Beneath it the subtitle sets in italic serif — small, personal, a human voice answering the historical phrase above it.

The whole cover is greyscale. That refuses the palette the shelf expects, and it does something more practical too: it lets two entirely unrelated photographs, taken in different places by different people, read as one image rather than as two things pasted together.

Scope of work

• Book cover design — front cover

A café in Kunming that became home to fifty people who had left home. The cover puts the two places they came from at opposite ends of one image and lets them meet in the middle — in the fog, where the birds are, and where the answer isn’t settled yet.