A room for every book

The Daily Canon gives its readers one great work of literature a day. I make the place each one is read in: the picture behind the words, and the weather that moves over it.

See The Daily Canon on the App Store

Client: The Daily Canon
Length: Four months, and ongoing
Tools: Illustrator
Photoshop
Nano Banana
Figma
Wacom Intuos Pro
iMac
Enjoyed it: ★★★★★

Close on the iMac screen: the Anna Karenina station roof selected in Illustrator, its anchor points and handles showing, the Layers panel beside it. — The station roof, mid-edit

Four layers

Every page is built as a stack. At the bottom is the picture, a still backdrop. On some pages a piece or two is drawn on a layer of its own so it can move, like the whale and the boat in Moby-Dick further down. Over it, drawn live on the phone, is the weather. Over that is the light: the lamps and windows I drew are lit again from above, so they can flicker and breathe. On top sit the words, the date, the day it marks, the title and the author, in the sky the picture left empty for them. The app plays its own sound underneath, but that part is not mine.

Pull the stack apart to see it, or switch a layer off.

The Anna Karenina page: a small country station at night in deep snow.

1. The picture

2. The weather

Weather Light Words

The snow drifts on a slow clock and the lamp flickers on two waves laid over each other, so it never quite repeats.

And one with things that move

Some books need more than weather. Moby-Dick is a storm at sea, and the page is built from two more pieces laid over the sea: the whale, which climbs out of the deep, hangs under the boat and turns away again, and the whaleboat itself, riding the chop.

Each one is drawn as its own layer, so it can move on its own clock while the sea stays still beneath it.

The Moby-Dick page: a storm sky over white-capped waves, and light falling through the water beneath.

1. The picture

4. The weather

Whale Boat Weather Words

Here the whale rises and sinks on a short loop so you can always see it; in the app it takes sixteen seconds and sometimes disappears altogether. The lightning comes about every five and a half.

Close on the iMac screen: the whale selected on its own layer in Illustrator, the sea above in outline mode, the Layers panel with the whale row highlighted. — The whale on its own layer

A brief for every book

Hal in a black hoodie leaning on the kitchen worktop in the barn studio late at night, a mug of coffee in one hand and a thumbs up with the other, a snowy night scene open in Illustrator on the iMac behind him. — Hal (Daily Canon founder) up at the studio late one night in the middle of it all

Hal came to me with most of the thinking already done. Every day the app opens on one book, with a single line from it in the middle of the screen, and he wanted the reader to feel they had walked somewhere. He already had ideas for hundreds of them.

For a lot of the books he had drawn the scene himself, as best he could, in Illustrator. Those were my starting points: I took his compositions and rebuilt them in my own style. A station in the snow for Anna Karenina. A green light across the water for Gatsby. Four swords (yes, four, not three, we debated this) against a wall for The Three Musketeers.

For the others he sent a colour palette and the key images from the book. I am not the reader Hal is, and I did not always know what a book should feel like, so much of the work was talk: long chats about the mood of a novel I had never opened, what the light should be doing, how cold or warm a page ought to feel. For a lot of pages I drafted the light and the composition with an image model first, before rebuilding the shapes and taking the picture apart into layers. Then we went back and forth until it was right.

The iMac in the barn with Anna Karenina half built in Illustrator: sky and snow finished, the station, lamp and train still blue outline paths. — The station for Anna Karenina, halfway through

A picture that knows where the words go

A dark tower among snow peaks with one violet window lit, the sky left open for the thunder and rain that are drawn over it live. — **Room for the storm**Frankenstein

A church and its graves on the marshes at dusk, the estuary beyond. — **One light**Great Expectations

A Georgian house at night with its windows lit, bare trees either side. — **Nobody home**Pride and Prejudice

The middle stays quiet. The title and the line sit in the top half of the screen, so the top half of every picture is mostly sky. The subject lives low, in the window between the words and the bottom of the phone. A quiet sky is not a calm one: on Frankenstein that open sky is where the storm plays out, drawn live over the picture.

One light. A lamp, a window, a moon, a sun going down. Never two competing.

Hardly anyone in the picture. Early on we took the people out of almost every page, and the pictures got better for it. Mostly I draw what they left behind: the lit windows of a house, a bench, swords set against a wall. When a book cannot do without them, like the whaleboat in Moby-Dick, they stay small and in silhouette.

Fewer, bigger shapes. Two or three tones to an object, a faint grain like a screenprint, and nothing you could count. If in doubt, leave it out.

Pictures that breathe

None of these pages is a still. Hal built the weather to my notes and we tuned it together, one book at a time: snow that drifts, rain that finds the ground, a lighthouse beam that turns once every eight seconds, a boat that rises a point or two on the swell.

Everything moves on a slow clock. You should be able to read a whole page and only notice afterwards that the snow was falling.

The storm here is turned up so you can see it: heavier rain and a flash of lightning every few seconds.