Donna Payne, 43, is the director of art at Faber & Faber. She lives with her husband Christien, an English teacher, and their children Hal, 9, and Robin, 3, in Tooting, south London

The sound of my daughter Robin singing through the walls wakes me at 5.30am. I get up, shower and dress in my uniform of black, grey and denim from brands like Zara and Gap. Our mornings are organised chaos – making packed lunches and eating porridge together as a family. I leave for work at 7.30am then walk 25 minutes to the station in my FitFlop boots, while Christien drops the kids at our childminder.

There are five of us in the art team at Faber’s Euston office and we design about 350 book covers a year – I juggle up to 30 covers at a time, each taking between two and 12 weeks. I began designing coffee table books and children’s books before starting at Faber. I get most inspiration away from my computer – I might be making dinner and an idea will pop into my head, so I start designing as soon as I arrive while the concept is fresh. I sketch an illustration on paper to show the cover team before we send it to a designer, or if the brief is for a photographic cover, I use a picture until we commission a photographer.

I read a lot of our titles, and before I design a cover I skim the book to get a feel for its tone, but I don’t always want to know all the details, as then I become the reader rather than the designer. Customers tend to look at a cover and decide if they want to buy it in a few seconds, so we need to convey quickly what kind of book it is. We often use colleagues and friends instead of models – my son starred on the cover of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, which was a huge campaign, so every morning I’d walk past his face on a billboard.

Donna Payne: Director Of Art, Faber & Faber