Work / Life — An interview with the brilliant Louise Fili, designer and former art director of Pantheon Books, at The Great Discontent:
Everybody wanted to use standard fonts, but I just wasn’t satisfied doing that. I didn’t realize this until years later, but what I was really doing was developing type treatments for the title of the book and approaching it more like a logo. I wanted each book to have its own personality and that couldn’t be achieved with standard fonts. Again, I was lucky because it was appropriate to do that for the types of books I was working on. The other thing to note is that I was collaborating with a lot of really talented illustrators and made a concerted effort to combine the type and image together. I also tried to encourage illustrators to create their own type. I would sketch it out for them and then ask them to actually draw it so it would become part of the illustration, which makes for a stronger design, whether it’s a book cover or logo.
Colour and Intention — Claire Cameron interviews Sam Garrett about his translation of The Dinner by Herman Koch, for the LA Review of Books:
The words a writer uses not only have a dictionary definition, but also a color and an intention. To pin those down, the translator has to sniff around. From the first to the final word of a translation, you’re leading the reader along a path to a destination. The color is what keeps the reader hopping; the intention is the scent that keeps the translator on the right path.
Negotiations — Jim Tierney explains his design process for the cover of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being:
I decided to run with the first concept that popped into my head: a very simple and tactile facsimile of the red Proust notebook, embossed with an illustration of Nao, floating spectrally above the rocky coast of British Columbia. I think this design is all about questions: How did this book get here? Was it lost intentionally, or by accident? Is Nao alive or dead? Is she even real?
Minimal designs like this is always a hard sell in cover meetings, and it was immediately rejected as too quiet and precious-looking. Loud, colorful, and commercial are popular adjectives in modern book marketing, but it’s always fun to start off negotiations with something a little more obscure.
And finally…
Welcome back from near-death Dan Mogford. Please don’t do that again.