Behind the Scenes of Patty Lyons’ Knitting ER, Part 2: Meet Book Designer Anna Wade
In Part 1 of Behind the Scenes of Patty Lyons’ Knitting ER, Franklin’s illustrations gave Patty Lyons’ Knitting ER: A step-by-step guide to fixing your knits, before and after bind off its characters and its heart. But it was our book designer, Anna Wade, who took all those pieces and turned them into an actual book.
Anna has been part of my dream team for three books now, and this time we’ll take a peek at how she builds the book’s color palette and overall look and feel. This has to work across hundreds of interior pages and every illustration Franklin and Linda send over. Finally, she is responsible for the reader’s first impression of the book: the cover.
Anna Wade
Anna has spent over 25 years in graphic design, including 12 years at an independent publisher, where she shaped the visual direction for more than 60 new titles a year. That kind of range means she’s designed just about every kind of book there is, and it shows in how she approaches mine.
Anna describes book design as a lot like branding. Every book is bespoke. The styling has to be consistent from cover to back page, but it also has to be tailored to the content, the subject, and the reader picking it up. For a book like Knitting ER, that meant a palette and a design language that could hold Franklin’s illustrations, Linda’s technical diagrams, and my (many) words, all at once, and still feel like one cohesive book.
Creating Our Color Palette
For Knitting Bag of Tricks, I wrote the book and knit the swatches, and the color scheme came later. Anna color-corrected the swatches and illustrations to match the color for each chapter.
For Knitting ER, I wanted to finalize our color palette first and then order yarn for the swatches to match.
Anna wanted the three books to be visually connected. She drew some colors from Knitting Bag of Tricks and brought in some brand-new ones. This kept Knitting ER fresh, while still bringing it into the family.
Laying Out the Fixes
Laying out pages involves more considerations than you might expect. Illustrations must stay with steps, page turns can’t split sections, and readability must match the book’s look.
Click the thumbnails to enlarge and see the page’s journey from early drafts through the tweaks that refined the layout for balance. Anna never gives up until it’s perfect!
The Journey to Our Cover
Nailing the book cover took a long time. We played with many medical images and color schemes. The first version played with the yarn ball as bandages. It didn’t quite feel right, and we both agreed that the black outline gave off a mummy vibe. Anna also created a lighter version of the mummy ER, and I played with inserting stethoscope clip art.
In the next version, we got closer. Once we made the yarn ball the patient, I realized that was the direction we needed to lean into. After all, Franklin had created our yarn ball patient, so it only made sense to keep that going on the cover.
The final step was getting the colors right. We both wanted to bring in the turquoise, but ultimately chose coral for the ER, which tied it into the other two books.
I was so happy with the final cover. I hope you like it!
Anna’s eye for consistency is why Knitting ER feels like it belongs on the shelf next to Bag of Tricks and the Workbook, even with a whole new cast of yarn-mojis running the show. Next up in the series, we’ll get into Linda Schmidt’s technical illustrations, the unsung heroes that make sure you can actually follow the fixes.
