This week at Melville House, we’re busy launching Is Journalism Worth Dying For?, which collects many of the final essays Anna Politkovskaya wrote before her murder in 2006. But although the book is appearing on store shelves now, the production process began nearly eight months ago with the design of the cover.

Starting work on the design involved spending time with the manuscript and conducting broad research into Anna’s life and work, as well as the political context in which she wrote. Jotting down notes and making lists of related words and concepts, I considered the central goal of any cover: to communicate the main idea of the book immediately to anyone who might see it in a bookstore or online.

But after some initial explorations of typographic layouts and conceptual illustrations, it quickly became clear that Anna herself needed to appear on the cover. As a widely known and loved writer, her face had become an iconic symbol for journalistic courage and integrity, and she was seen on posters at memorials around the world after her death. However, many of the most recognizable photographs of her seemed to reflect the grief of her mourners rather than the spark everyone saw in her life.

Feeling these early layouts were too gloomy, I started my search over, and finally discovered the work of the Swedish photojournalist Maria Söderberg, who has travelled extensively in Russia and in the past often worked with the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. Söderberg’s portrait of Anna Politkovskaya, which was taken near Anna’s office in Moscow in 2003, perfectly captures her as she was in life—intense and energetic, but so kind and elegant as well—and when your eyes meet hers, you know she has incredible stories to tell. The moment I saw this image, I knew it would be the cover.

To maximize the impact of this striking portrait, I otherwise kept the design as restrained as possible, setting the type in Franklin Gothic because of its strong association with newspaper headlines. In the end, my hope is that the design gets out of the way and lets Anna tell her own story.