As a book cover designer, Sarahmay WILKINSON’02 belongs to a niche category in the design world.
For those who have stumbled upon her artistry in bookstores, airport gift shops or retail sites online, one thing is clear: capturing the essence of an author’s work with eye-catching, memorable graphics is a rare skill that she has mastered.
Based in Bellport, New York, a seaside village on Long Island, Sarahmay joins our video call from the home she shares with her partner—a marine scientist—and their toddler. With a good dose of self-deprecating humour, she describes the challenge of absorbing complex ideas, stories and themes expressed in words and translating their essence into a visual representation using typography, imagery, texture and colour. “Good design is often about storytelling in a concise and impactful way,” she says.
It’s clear that Sarahmay is at the top of her game. Her award-winning work is regularly shortlisted in annual best-of rankings by The New York Times and was featured at the prestigious Bologna Book Fair. Her compelling covers have graced books by such famed authors as Edna O’Brien, Joy Harjo, ’Pemi Aguda and Roddy Doyle, to name a few.
“I have to give my family credit for their support and encouragement of my creativity,” she says. The youngest of four children, Sarahmay was born in Dublin and grew up in Bray, County Wicklow, in a home teeming with artistic talent. “My siblings all went to colleges for the arts, whether it was for architecture, music, fashion or design. My father is a professional singer and performer, and my mother used to work as a TV producer.”
By the time six-year-old Sarahmay and her family moved to Toronto, a pattern had already emerged. “From an early age, art was my thing. My eldest brother, Aaron, still has a painting I made at six.”
At age 10, she entered Branksome, where her talent was recognized by “very kind and supportive” Junior School Art teachers Jacinthe Roy and Judith Phelan. Her Senior School Art teacher, Heather Pratt, let her take over the small room next to the art class. “I would go up there any spare moment I had and work on my art,” she says. “She was absolutely my number one advocate.”
Determined to pursue a career in art and design, the budding creative began preparing her advanced placement portfolios on her own and a year earlier than required, wandering the halls of Branksome carrying two knapsacks: one on her back filled with textbooks for her regular classes, and another in front containing materials for her art school applications.
“Work begets work, inspiration comes of doing, so don’t stop moving. When I feel stuck, I just do the next thing: choose the next typeface, the next colour palette, the next image. As I keep working, things unlock themselves.”
“The culture at Branksome normalized ambition for young women—the idea that you could be both creative and driven, artistic and analytical,” she says. By the end of Grade 11, Sarahmay had created a series of custom portfolios for applications to 13 post-secondary programs in Canada, the United States and the U.K.
At 17, she went downtown to meet with representatives from the major Canadian and U.S. art schools at the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University). She was first in line to have her portfolio reviewed by the admissions team for New York’s renowned Parsons School of Design, who were impressed with what they saw.
Remarkably, she was accepted into every one of the schools, and opted to study design at Parsons. Alone in Manhattan at 18, she navigated a reality that was nothing like the “safe, kind and gentle Branksome community. On some subconscious level, it was absolutely terrifying but also transformative,” she says. “It’s a big place with a beautifully diverse population. My brain and heart were bust right open.”
An internship with the cult beauty brand Bumble and bumble led to a job there designing packaging and learning about shelf appeal, merchandising and branding. “It was so fun. Everyone was young and energetic,” she says. She left Bumble in 2009 for other art opportunities, and by 2016, while working at the French beauty brand Coty, she was offered a position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of New York’s premium literary publishers.
Could there be two more contrasting industries than beauty and publishing? “Actually, designing covers for a book is no different than designing packaging for a lipstick or a shampoo,” she says. “When people purchase those products, they’re buying a lifestyle, an identity. It’s similar to a book cover: you’re sharing a snapshot of the possibility of something.”
In meeting the challenge of rebooting her career at age 33, Sarahmay had conducted a series of informational interviews and portfolio reviews with more than 20 book cover designers.
“I assumed a huge amount of financial and professional risk with that pivot,” she says. “I hustled so hard, that within three or four years, I was in pretty good standing within the New York book cover design community.”
In 2018, Sarahmay’s fabled reputation led to a job at New York’s W.W. Norton & Company, among the publishing world’s most established companies. Seven years and four promotions later, she landed her current role as its Associate Design Director.
Sarahmay oversees cover designs for approximately 50 Norton titles annually, and each one may generate anywhere from six to 70 cover drafts. Starting with a careful reading of the author’s manuscript, her approach involves “scribbling really rough sketches” in the margins and distilling them down to five top ideas.
In addition to her full-time position at Norton, Sarahmay runs her own interdisciplinary design studio, where she works with a set of clients ranging from small business owners to international beauty brands.
Juggling a variety of projects helps stimulate inspiration and ideas, so it’s no surprise that momentum is a critical ingredient in Sarahmay’s creative process. It’s also key to shedding the perfectionist tendencies she developed “growing up in a household filled with tremendously creative, talented people and then also being at a school like Branksome, where high performance was a requirement,” she says.
Her personal maxim? “Work begets work, inspiration comes of doing, so don’t stop moving. When I feel stuck, I just do the next thing: choose the next typeface, the next colour palette, the next image. As I keep working, things unlock themselves.”
Sarahmay often turns to the world around her for inspiration, whether it’s the children’s books she reads to her son, the bookstores she visits to peruse work by her colleagues, or the marine charts her partner consults at work.
“Everything is visual, everything is beautiful,” she says. Spoken like a true storyteller.
Book covers designed by Sarahmay shared with permission from W.W. Norton & Company
