The brief was: “Make sure this doesn’t get filed in the agriculture section.” I tried a couple of other things, before coming across an article on Eastern European design of the 1950s. I wanted the book to have a slightly handmade, low-tech quality to it, so the idea of producing something quite bold in two colors seemed to fit.

A lot of the archive images I looked at showed men with sleeves rolled up, posing with machinery. The narrator and central character of the book is female, and I thought it could be fun to put her into one of these industrial scenes.

Basically, I found a matchbox label of a guy on a steamroller and pimped his ride. I then added some smoke to contain the type, set the whole thing at angle and slightly off-center, and ran some texture through it to make it look badly printed.