Work ✿ Book design
The Jane Austen Trio
Three novels, one botanical system. A collectible set designed cover to cover — jackets, spines, and full interior typesetting — where each book gets its own fruit, its own palette, and a tea pairing printed on the back.
The problem with pretty classics
Public-domain classics are the most reprinted books on earth, which means most editions solve the same problem the same way: a stock painting, a serif title, done. They look interchangeable on a shelf — and a set of three interchangeable books is not a set, it’s three books.
I wanted an edition that rewards owning all three. Something where the shared language is obvious at a glance, but each novel still gets a personality of its own.
One grammar, three dialects
The system is a single hand-drawn botanical frame, redrawn per book rather than recolored. Every cover carries the same five parts, so the spines line up and the set reads as a family:
- A mirrored vine border in two greens, growing from the bottom corners upward
- A fruit motif unique to the novel, repeated through the vines and clustered once at the base
- An ornate cartouche holding the title in a green serif
- Four corner squares alternating a Jane Austen silhouette with a quatrefoil flower
- Austen’s signature across the top, with the title ghosted in script behind the cartouche
What changes between books is the fruit and the ground colour — and because the fruit drives the palette, the three covers end up as different as blueberry, strawberry, and peach actually are.
The palettes came from the fruit
Each book’s colours were pulled from photographs of its fruit before any drawing started — so the greens are leaf greens, and the grounds are the pale, milky tones you get when you tint a fruit colour way down. Nothing in the set is a swatch I picked because it looked nice next to another swatch.
The tea pairing
The detail that made the set click. Each back cover names a tea chosen to match the novel’s fruit — so the object suggests how to use it. You are not just buying Emma, you are buying an afternoon.
It also solved a real design problem: back covers on classics are usually dead space filled with a summary everyone already knows. This gave the back a reason to exist.
Inside the covers
All three novels were typeset in full, not mocked up — running heads, drop caps, chapter openers, and front matter, laid out in InDesign against the 6 × 9 print-on-demand trim and exported to a printer’s cover template with live bleed and spine width. The interiors carry the same botanical vocabulary at a whisper: chapter ornaments drawn from each book’s vine, nothing loud enough to fight the reading.
- Trim 6 × 9 in, print-on-demand
- Covers Illustrator • vector, spine width calculated per page count
- Interiors InDesign • full text, front matter, chapter openers
- Type Austen’s signature script, green serif titling, classic book serif for body
- Output Print-ready PDF/X covers and interiors, proofed in physical copies
What I’d keep
The constraint that paid off was drawing the border three times instead of recolouring it once. It cost the most hours and it is the only reason the three books feel hand-made rather than templated — the vines actually grow differently around each fruit.