The design secrets behind The Time Traveler’s Wife

There are few books and few covers that have lodged themselves in reader's memories in quite the same way as The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The extraordinary love story arrived with emotional force and that unforgettable visual identity more than two decades ago, becoming a word-of-mouth phenomenon and going on to sell over 9 million copies and spawn multiple adaptations. Now, as the novel is reissued ahead of the publication of its long-awaited sequel, Life Out of Order, there is a rare act of creative time travel at work too: Suzanne Dean, Creative Director at Vintage and the designer behind that first iconic cover, has revisited and reimagined her own design for a new generation of readers. Here, she reveals the secrets behind both covers:

What do you remember about the first brief for The Time Traveler’s Wife cover?

Well, I don’t think I had an official brief because it didn’t really work like that all that time ago. The publisher, Dan Franklin, handed the manuscript over to me and said, ‘This is amazing. This is really special. We’ve got to reinvent the wheel,’ which was something he said to me quite a lot! ‘We need to have something wonderful for the cover.’ And then I went away and read the manuscript and then went back to talk to him. We came up with the concept of the girl in the meadow next to a pile of clothes, and that’s what I commissioned.

There’s actually a really lovely story behind both the original and the new cover. I commissioned the amazing photographer Tim Hetherington to do the photograph for the original. I said I wanted a pile of clothes and the girl next to the pile of clothes out in the meadow, which he captured. He brought it in, but then looking at it, I felt like it needed those brown pair of shoes adding. So, I sent him away to separately photograph the pair of shoes, and obviously they had to be in the same sort of light, the same style. Then, nobody knows this, I added the pair of shoes to the pile of clothes and of course that is one of the significant elements of the cover.

I commissioned artist Oona Ode to do the illustration for the reissue paperback of The Time Traveler’s Wife and she has also been commissioned to do Life Out of Order, which is Audrey’s sequel, and they make a great pair. What I particularly like about the illustration is the linear, drawn quality, the little details of the shirt, and the socks, with the lines that echo the grasses behind her in the meadow. It’s very beautifully done and the colour is bold and graphic. That’s why I wanted her to do this cover: it has that otherworldly quality. When it came to designing the layout, the elements were completely separate, and so there I was yet again adding the brown pair of shoes to the pile of clothes myself. It was such a strange time-travelling kind of experience!

What feeling were you trying to capture in the original?

I was trying to capture something that felt ordinary. After all, it’s a girl in a field. But also something slightly odd, a bit quirky, a bit mysterious, a bit hazy summer day. I wanted the reader to question what was going on, question the pile of clothes next to her with a flask, and you can tell that some of the area of the photograph has got that slight blur. So that was my way of trying to suggest time.

Did you know at the time that that cover would become so recognisable?

You never, ever know if what you’re working on is going to be really iconic and recognisable. It’s just one of those things. But I did know that the book was incredible and I so admire Audrey Niffenegger and her writing, and the fact she’s got such an incredible visual eye – that I knew was special. So, it was something that was going to happen. It was such a great book.

How do you approach redesigning a book that readers already feel attached to? And what did you want to preserve from the original?

Very carefully, with great consideration. You have to take what really works and what’s iconic, and refresh it, really.

Clare’s shoes are the same, sort of Mary Janes. Then you have the brown brogues. And then you also see the flask. Somehow that little detail is quite important, as are the colours: the taupe and turquoise. The new colour, of course, is the bright yellow. I think that yellow plays a significant part in Oona’s illustrations and so it seemed natural for her to incorporate the yellow into the cover. In Life Out of Order, yellow is quite a signature colour and so it seemed sensible to carry it over onto the paperback of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

What needed to change for readers discovering it now?

When I did the original cover, photography was what was popular on all covers really. It was very rare that illustration was out there on a book like this. We did a lot more commissioning of photography then, but times have changed to what is more of a trend towards illustration now. To refresh it, the obvious move was to commission an illustration. What I was looking for, if you remember me saying, was that sort of summer haze and otherworldliness. Of course, it feels very different, but there is something otherworldly about it and something a little bit quirky despite the fact that it’s quite a linear, drawn illustration.

What does it feel like to return to this story now?

It feels like I’m a bit of a time traveller!

It’s very rare for me to be in this sort of situation all these years later – to come back to the same book cover. It’s like meeting an old friend again, the same story, but time’s gone by and it’s essentially still its genius self.