Adly Elewa

Adly Elewa – Designer

Designer and Illustrator. I design literary fiction, pop-sci, and current affair books. I have worked at Penguin, FSG, and Melville House.

Overview

Hi, I am Adly. I have designed award winning literary fiction and popular science titles at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Penguin Press, and Melville House.

Most notable projects include
Cover illustrations for Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot , and Juno Diaz's This is How You Lose Her.

Throughout my career I have worked in a range of styles. I’ve had to switch often between fiction and nonfiction titles, and each demands a different process. I’ll always consider the stylistic ephemera of the novel, the author’s voice, and the generic conventions it plays with to conceive an image that’s both striking and textually relevant.

Nonfiction necessitates a more direct approach similar to that of an editorial illustration, with a clever
graphic summary of the book’s argument or idea. I always like to picture the targeted reader of each particular title and try to echo their interests and peculiarities, which ultimately leads to a much richer portfolio that isn't bogged down by my own stylistic crutches. The ultimate goal with every cover is to identify an image that sticks with the reader, while also reaching a happy compromise between publisher, author, and designer.

Clients include:
Rodrigo Corral Studio, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Criterion Collection,Penguin Books, New York Times, Tory Burch, Fortune Magazine,Simon and Schuster, Verso, Overlook Press, New Directions,Norton Books, Cult Records, Warby Parker and The Paris Review
Services
Non-Fiction
History Music Philosophy Political Science & Current Affairs Technology
Fiction
Humor & Comedy Literary Fiction
Languages
English

Work experience

Icrave

Mar, 2017 — Aug, 2019 (over 2 years)

Branding, Packaging Design, Interior Design, Concept Design

Self-employed

May, 2015 — Mar, 2017 (almost 2 years)

Worked at various design studios and ad agencies such as

Mother New York, Anomaly, and McCann as a designer. Clients include New York Lotto, USPS, Squarespace, Target, Oscar, and Verizon.

Melville House

Oct, 2014 — May, 2015 (7 months)

I was responsible for designing the covers and interiors of every Melville House title as well as addressing production concerns

Penguin Press

May, 2013 — Oct, 2014 (over 1 year)

I designed many prestigious fiction and non-fiction titles under the art direction of Darren Haggar

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

May, 2011 — May, 2013 (about 2 years)

I designed many prestigious fiction and non-fiction titles under the art direction of Rodrigo Corral

Portfolio

In the tradition of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, a rousing, sharply argued—and, yes, inspiring!—reckoning with our blind faith in technology Can technology solve all our problems? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of our most famous j... read more
In Vitamania, award-winning journalist Catherine Price takes readers on a lively journey through the past, present and future of the mysterious micronutrients known as human vitamins--an adventure that includes poison squads and political maneuvering, irradiat... read more
In the humane tradition of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers comes a searing account of the international refugee crisis.On the day of his son’s fourteenth birthday, Hashem al-Souki lay somewhere in the Mediterranean, crammed in a wooden dinghy. Hi... read more
Peace, many would agree, is a goal that democratic nations should strive to achieve. But is democracy, in fact, dependent on war to survive?Having spent their celebrated careers exploring this provocative question, John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth t... read more
From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s ... read more
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a scale of "madness" along which we all sit. Incorporating the latest advances in brain scanning and ne... read more
The Reflection

Hugo Wilcken

Hugo Wilcken's first novel, The Execution—a taut, psychological mystery about an average person who commits an accidental murder—got the kind of rave reviews authors dream of: He was compared to Camus and Hitchcock.Now, in his second novel, The Reflection, the... read more
From the chief economic commentator for the Financial Times, a brilliant tour d’horizon of the new global economy and its trajectoryThere have been many books that have sought to explain the causes and courses of the financial and economic crisis which began i... read more
The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's mus... read more
An Amazon Book of the Month, February 2014 From the author of the cult classic Winkie, an extraordinarily honest, shockingly funny memoir of a man torn between isolation and connection In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides,... read more
"As a sex writer, Jesse Bering is fearless―and peerless." ―Dan Savage"You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through." We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in Perv, there is a spectrum ... read more
Has the world’s hottest pop star been kidnapped, joined a secret sect, or simply gone into hiding? The answer lies in the abandoned subway stations of Chicago . . . One minute insanely famous pop singer Molly Metropolis is on her way to a major performance in ... read more
Good on Paper

Rachel Cantor

THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SECOND NOVEL FROM THE WRITER EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL (STATION ELEVEN) CALLS “SHARP, WITTY, AND IMMENSELY ENTERTAINING” Is a new life possible? Because Shira Greene’s life hasn’t quite turned out as planned. She’s a single mom living with h... read more
Lightning Rods

Helen DeWitt

From the acclaimed author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods is "the most well-executed literary sex comedy" of our time. Described as “the most well-executed literary sex comedy” of our time by Salon.com, and “a wickedly smart satire that deserves to be a cl... read more
A sly, sexy, and profoundly haunting work, The Carp Castle is the story of a disparate group of strangers adrift and confused in the decade after the First World War. These haunted men and broken women find themselves bound together by an ineffable force: the ... read more
New York Times Book Review "[S]mart, delightful... a splendidly entertaining education in ethics, activism and science.”Editors's Choice, New York Times Book ReviewAn impassioned defense of intellectual freedom and a clarion call to intellectual responsibility... read more
A sweeping history of the men and women who transformed postwar Germany—and created a musical genre that revolutionized rock and roll and gave birth to hip-hop. West Germany after World War II was a country in shock: estranged from its recent history, and adri... read more
Finalist for the 2012 National Book AwardA Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012Finalist for the 2012 Story PrizeChosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes b... read more
Twenty-year-old Skyler saw the incident out her window: Some sort of metallic object hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge just before it collapsed and a mushroom cloud lifted above the city. Like everyone, she ran, but she couldn't outrun the radiation, with h... read more
A majestic big-picture account of the Great Society and the forces that shaped it, from Lyndon Johnson and members of Congress to the civil rights movement and the mediaBetween November 1963, when he became president, and November 1966, when his party was rout... read more
Eighty-six-year-old Betty Halbreich is a true original. A tough broad who could have stepped straight out of Stephen Sondheim’s repertoire, she has spent nearly forty years as the legendary personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, where she works with socialites,... read more
Gain the basic skills you'd need to live through a cataclysmic event—one humbling and angst-filled lesson at a time We're inundated daily with images of chaos and catastrophe from movies, books, and the nightly news. When Sam Sheridan became a father, these ta... read more
An Independent and New Statesman Book of the YearBeyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit—a world of Google, Facebook, and Twitter—lies a vast and often hidden network of sites, communities, and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits, a... read more
A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of ... read more
A New York Times Notable Book of 2011A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 titleOne of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year ... read more
A major new novel from the writer Roberto Bolaño called “one of the best living Latin American writers” Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature's rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the... read more
Septimania: A Novel

Jonathan Levi

Septimania, Jonathan Levi's first novel since 1992's critically acclaimed A Guide for the Perplexed, is a major work―a story at once personal and mythic, with themes as large as the universe and as small as an appleseed.On an spring afternoon in 1978 in the lo... read more
A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the AntarcticZeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to ope... read more
"A singular astonishment." ―John Lahr, The New YorkerOne relationship. Infinite possibilities. In the beginning Marianne and Roland meet at a party. They go for a drink, or perhaps they don't. They fall madly in love and start dating, but eventually they break... read more
The Happy Marriage

Tahar Ben Jelloun

“Ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s greatest living author, whose impressive body of work combines intellect and imagination in magical fusion.” —The Guardian In The Happy Marriage, the internationally acclaimed Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story... read more
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforge... read more
From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie... read more
From a leading financial economist, a searching examination of the ethics of modern finance.In 2001, Goldman Sachs structured a complex financial contract so that its client, the government of Greece, would appear to have far less debt than it actually did. Wh... read more
A leading literary critic’s innovative study of how the Nobel Prize–winning author turned life into art.Saul Bellow was the most lauded American writer of the twentieth century—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and ... read more
Lotus: A Novel

Lijia Zhang

Inspired by the secret life of the author’s grandmother, Lotus follows a young woman torn between past traditions and modern desires—as she carves out a life for herself in China’s “City of Sins” “Standing outside the Moonflower Massage Parlor with three other... read more

Adly has 6 reviews

Professionalism

Quality

Value

Responsiveness

Jamie Z.

Jamie Z.

Oct, 2021

Just the best of the best. Adly tried out everything I threw at him until we found something that worked for the cover of Jerkwater. When I finish the next one, I'll be bugging him again for sure.
Jamie Z.

Jamie Z.

Jun, 2019

Adly is the real deal. I knew what I wanted (something simple and cool) and he was with me every step of the way in designing the cover for JERKWATER. And when I needed changes he went above and beyond in giving me options to choose from. Worth every penny. I seriously doubt you could do better.
Kirk K.

Kirk K.

Feb, 2019

Adly is professional and responsive, and I'm very pleased with the work he did. I'd work with him again, and I'd recommend him to others.
Jonathan L.

Jonathan L.

Dec, 2018

I highly recommend Adly as a cover designer. He created a beautiful cover for my novel and was responsive and professional throughout the process. Due to some interior formatting issues, my page count and trim size changed a few times, but Adly continued to adjust the cover dimensions until it was just right. I wouldn't hesitate to hire Adly again for future projects.
Nell G.

Nell G.

Jul, 2017

Adly did an incredible job on my cover and I'm really pleased with it. He was responsive, easy to work with, and made changes quickly. Can't recommend him highly enough.

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