Toucan Tango

The idea

The pun came first.

The idiom is “it takes two to tango,” often shortened to “two can tango.” It means that when two people are in conflict, both of them own it. That is the setup of the story, so the title existed before anything else did. And the pun handed me the cover: two toucans.

The premise is based on The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren. My version is a romantic comedy set at a tropical wildlife sanctuary, where two people who cannot stand each other end up working together to save it.

The image

One picture, two leads.

I licensed an illustration of a pair of toucans facing each other in dense foliage. It establishes the two characters and the sanctuary setting at once, so the image is telling the story rather than decorating it. The coral and blue in that illustration then set the palette for the entire jacket. It came from Shutterstock, with the required attribution printed on the back cover.

The type

Three typefaces, three jobs.

Pacifico carries the title. Vernon Adams drew it in 2011, inspired by 1950s American surf culture, and it brings the warm, do-not-take-me-too-seriously feeling immediately.

Montserrat handles the subtitle and the spine. Julieta Ulanovsky based it on old signage in Buenos Aires, and its geometry keeps the playful script in check.

Bree Serif carries the body copy on the back and the flaps. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione designed it to read as friendly rather than formal, which is what a beach read wants.

The object

A jacket, not a cover.

The deliverable was the whole jacket, not just the front: spine width, the ISBN barcode, the price, the publisher mark, and copy that flows across separate panels while still reading as one object.