The Unloved by Deborah Levy
The Unloved is a novel by Deborah Levy, published by Bloomsbury in 2015. The story is a classic whodunnit, about a murder among a group of tourists in a remote hotel.
The cover design by Katya Mezhibovskaya (with art direction by Patti Ratchford) uses equally classic typefaces – Sackers Gothic and ITC Bodoni Six. This secondary information moves away to the edges of the cover, shifting the viewer’s attention to the centered book title, hovering before a misty view.
For the title, the designer chose Metallophile Sp8, a “facsimile of 8-point sans serif letters as set on a hot metal typesetting machine”, digitized by Mark Simonson. The muddy details of the lowercase letters are magnified for dramatic effect: combined with the ‘murder mystery’ genre, the muddy ink of metal letters easily evokes associations with blood, detectives and forensics.
