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Jack Smyth: Jacket and Spine

Irish designer Jack Smyth, whose work has featured here more than a few times, talked to Totally Dublin about his process for designing book covers:

The best briefs are the ones that give you everything you need but prescribe nothing, and are genuinely trying to achieve something new… When I’m working on fiction, tone is the thing that really interests me. I think trying to capture the tone of the author’s writing can be a really powerful way of communicating with the viewer and, as a result, I often try to avoid leaning too much specific imagery. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but I do always try to keep tone/the author’s voice as the main directive element. I think this is what makes or breaks a book for a reader, not necessarily the location, any element or makeup of characters… I try not to rely on figurative elements too much in the hope that I can draw people in in more subtle ways.

Jack also recently chatted to The Resting Willow blog about book covers, including his design Pure Gold by John Patrick McHugh:

The cover is quite simple – it’s type and colours and textures, but hopefully it captures the tone of John’s voice and the character of the stories. I think these are my favourite types of covers, the ones where there’s almost no figurative elements, but they feel right.

Nice work, Jack. :-)

One Comment

  1. Jeff

    “The best briefs are the ones that give you everything you need but prescribe nothing”—this really resonates with me. I’ve often wondered if authors/publishers know how tough it is, for a designer, to work with anything that’s been pre-chosen (I design alot of poetry books, and one of the sorrows of my worklife is this tradition in poetry publishing that poets get to choose an artwork to go on their front cover). It’s so much easier to become imaginative when all that’s been sent to me by the publisher is their desires for general feelingtones. I read the ms. and then get to work, and often (usually?) it’s a generative way of going about things. Thanks for this amazing website, btw. oxox, J

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