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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. :-)

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Jon Gray on Designing Book Covers for Zadie Smith

It’s Nice That talks to Jon Gray, AKA Gray318, about his design process and working on covers for high-profile authors like Zadie Smith: 

Jon’s covers are not simply aesthetically pleasing; they’re also suitably thoughtful. He always asks for the most text possible from his clients, in order to kickstart his creative process. “I struggle designing without knowing the mood of the book, it’s character,” he says. “I’m not good at fishing in the dark for concepts and I think my best work comes about when it’s rooted in the text.”

But sometimes, he has to make do with very little. Which is why working with gifted authors like Zadie Smith and wonderful editors like Simon Prosser (Zadie’s editor) is such a blessing: “They will send me a great brief that outlines the plot and sets the mood. There will be visual references and often a strong sense of the area that the book should sit, but with plenty of room to experiment.”

He adds that working with high-profile clients is easier than one might think. “People often imagine that designing covers for big authors is going to be harder somehow. It’s true that marketing and sales departments have a big say in the final cover, but generally, if you can make an author and their editor happy, the rest will follow.”

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Book Covers of Note 2018

This has been an exhausting year for oh so, so many reasons, but book covers remained a bright spot for me in 2018. 

As always, my end-of-year list collects together the covers that I found interesting or noteworthy in some way or another in the past 12 months. It is organized alphabetically by title and grouped by designer (because that makes sense to me when I’m compiling the list). 

In terms of trends, there were a lot of hot orange book covers this year. Stark black, white and red covers were popular for non-fiction. Stars and stripes featured heavily too (I refuse to do a post about this!). Snakes seemed to be a thing!

Typographically, big white sans serifs are still a go-to. And hand-lettering and handwriting are still going strong. But retro typefaces, particularly big serifs with swishy swashes, are making a comeback. 

Thanks as always to everyone who has supported the blog this year, especially the folks who have taken the time to help with cover images and design credits. I’m sorry for the many, many the emails I have not replied to this year, and for all the covers, designers, and publishers I have overlooked. 


Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya; design by Stephanie Ross (Knopf / March 2018)

Stephanie Ross’s cover for Ruth Bader Ginsberg by Jane Sherron De Hart, published by Knopf in October, also caught my eye this year. 



Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore by Emma Southon; design by Mark Ecob (Unbound / August 2018)



America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo; design by Gray318 (Atlantic Books / May 2018)

Also designed by Gray318:

(I got to visit Jon in his studio this summer, which was nice.)



Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald; design David Pearson (Penguin / June 2018)

Also designed by David Pearson:



The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch; design by Rafi Romaya; illustration by Florian Schommer (Canongate / January 2018)



Born To Be Posthumous by Mark Dery; design by Jim Tierney; photograph by Richard Corman (Little Brown & Co. / November 2018)

Congratulations to Jim and Sara on the birth of their baby last month! 



Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber; design by David Litman (Simon & Schuster / May 2018)



Cherry by Nico Walker; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / August 2018)

Also designed by Janet Hansen:



Circe by Madeline Miller; design by Will Staehle (Little Brown & Co / April 2018)

Also designed by Will Staehle:



Codex 1962 by Sjón; design by Rodrigo Corral (MCD / September 2018)

The cover of the UK edition of Codex 1962 published by Sceptre, which features art by Owen Gent, is also beautiful.

Also designed by Rodrigo Corral Studio: 



The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin; design by Rachel Willey (Henry Holt / April 2018)

Also designed by Rachel Willey:



The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams; design by Joan Wong (New Directions / September 2018)



Educated by Tara Westover; illustration by Patrik Svensson (Random House / March 2018)

Probably the most ubiquitous nonfiction book of the year (if not, in the end, the bestselling). Canada and the UK went with photographic covers. This was more memorable I thought. 



Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / November 2018)

Also designed by Na Kim:



he Fed and Lehman Brothers by Laurence M. Ball; design by Catherine Casalino (University of Cambridge Press / June 2018)

Also designed by Catherine Casalino:



The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer; design by Ben Denzer (Riverhead Books / April 2018)

I also really liked Ben Denzer’s typographic cover for A Short Film About Disappointment by Joshua Mattson (Penguin Press / August 2018).



Feminasty by Erin Gibson; design by Anne Twomey; photograph by Ricky Middlesworth (Grand Central / September 2018)



The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem; design Allison Saltzman; photograph Kate Bellm (Ecco Press / November 2018)



Fox 8 by George Saunders; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / November 2018)



Gin: Distilled by Gin Foundry; design by James Paul Jones (Ebury Press / October 2018)



Gun Love by Jennifer Clement; design by Michael Morris (Hogarth / March 2018)

Also designed by Michael Morris:



Hippie by Paulo Coelho; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / September 2018)

Also designed by Tyler Comrie:



The Hole by José Revueltas; design by John Gall (New Directions / November 2018)

Also designed by John Gall:

(Don’t forget about the new book collecting 10 years of John Gall’s collages!)



The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara; design by Sara Wood (Ecco / February 2018)

You can read about the design of this cover on Literary Hub



The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran; design by Alex Merto (Atria Books / September 2018)

Also designed by Alex Merto:



In the Distance by Hernan Diaz; design by Luke Bird (Daunt Books / June 2018)

I read the US edition of In the Distance (Coffee House Press / 2017) earlier this year. It is quite extraordinary and not what I expected — a western, but not really. I was really pleased that Daunt decided to publish it in the UK. 

Also designed by Luke Bird:



The Island That Disappeared by Tom Feiling; design by Marina Drukman (Melville House / March 2018)



The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman; design by Jaya Miceli (Viking / March 2018)

Also designed by Jaya Miceli:



A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne; design by Jo Thomson (Doubleday / August 2018)



Liveblog by Megan Boyle; design by Nicole Caputo (Tyrant Books / September 2018)

Also designed by Nicole Caputo:

The Gunners — a novel about a group of misfit friends reuniting at a funeral — was a favourite in my office this year. 



The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner; design by Peter Mendelsund; photograph by Nan Goldin (Scribner / May 2018)

Also designed by Peter Mendelsund:



My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci; design by Anna Morrison (Pushkin Press / April 2018)

I thought this was a nice contrast to the cover of the US edition designed by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / April 2017). It’s interesting that only the cat’s ear makes an appearance, and the snake (a boa constrictor in the story I think?) is more prominent.  

Also designed by Anna Morrison:



No Country Woman by Zoya Patel; design by Astred Hicks (Hachette Australia / August 2018)



Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus; design by Jamie Keenan (Granta / September 2018)

Also designed by Jamie Keenan:



On Gravity by A. Zee; design by Jason Alejandro (Princeton University Press / May 2018)



Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel; design by Tom Starr (Yale University Press / March 2018)



The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani; design by Julianna Lee (Penguin / January 2018)



The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor; design by Strick&Williams (Catapult / August 2018)



She Wants It by Jill Soloway; design by Elena Giavaldi (Crown / October 2018)



The Son of Black Thursday by Alejandro Jodorowsky; design by Richard Ljoenes (Restless Books / November 2018)

Richard Ljoenes recently talked about designing covers for Alejandro Jodorowsky — the cover of Where the Bird Sings Best was on my 2016 notable list — with Spine Magazine



The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams; design by Jack Smyth (Simon & Schuster / August 2018)

Also designed by Jack Smyth:



A Superior Spectre by Angela Meyer; design by Design by Committee (Ventura / August 2018)



Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott; design by Lauren Wakefield (Hutchinson / June 2018)



Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering; design Donna Cheng (Simon & Schuster / July 2018)

Crossing out is a thing.



Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier; design Dan Mogford (The Bodley Head / June 2018)

Also designed by Dan Mogford:



There There by Tommy Orange; design by Suzanne Dean; art by Bryn Perrott (Harvill Secker / July 2018)

You can read about the design of this cover at Spine Magazine.

Also designed by Suzanne Dean:



This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga; design Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / August 2018)

Also designed by Kimberly Glyder:


Tin Man by Sarah Winman; design by Grace Han ( G.P. Putnam’s Sons / May 2018)

Everyone should read Tin Man btw. It is sad and lovely.

Also designed by Grace Han:



Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver; design by Ami Smithson (Faber & Faber / October 2018)

This has rather fancy edges (and endpapers I believe):



The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn; design by Elsie Lyons (William Morrow / January 2018)

I also really liked Elisie Lyons’ glamorously noir cover for Sunburn by Laura Lippman (William Morrow / February 2018).

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David Pearson on Books and Typography

At the Monotype blog, Theo Inglis talks to designer David Pearson about his career and his type-centric approach to book covers:

We are increasingly being urged to create objects of desire and the cover obviously plays a key role here, especially when a book is aiming for pride of place in a bookshop. Designers visit them regularly, to note the common visual language of related or competing titles. It can be a source of frustration then, when presenting a contrasting or conflicting design aimed at standing out, only to be asked to produce a copycat cover intended to hitch on the success of the latest best-seller. Booksellers often create themed displays dedicated to the latest hot trend, see Hygge for example. Publishers are all-too aware of this and often the pursuit of a like-for-like cover is their priority… Being allowed to use ‘just type’ will always be dependent on what books are blazing a commercial trail… Jon Gray’s cover for Swing Time and John Gall’s for Norwegian Wood, to take two current examples, prove to publishers that the mass market can handle bold, type-driven design and so this approach will be validated for a time. 

You read my 2009(!) Q & A with David here

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SPINE Interview with Suzanne Dean

Designer Holly Dunn talks to Suzanne Dean, Creative Director at Vintage Books and one of the UK’s leading cover designers, for SPINE Magazine:

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The Rest of the Best

When it comes to choosing the year’s best book covers, it seems that everyone is at it these days…

“These covers are challenging without being impenetrable and playful without being precious — none of which is an easy task for a designer. If good design might lure us into an experience that makes us smarter, then we’ve hit the jackpot when the book allows us to spend time within the head space of a stranger.”     

I always look forward to Matt Dorfmann’s selections for the New York Times Book Review. Matt is the NYTBR‘s art director and a cover designer in his own right so he knows what he’s talking about, and his choices are always interesting. If I am honest, I think this is the list the designers (American designers at least) really pay attention to. And it’s worth noting that half of Matt’s choices this year were designed by women. 

Slate’s list of Best Book Jackets of 2016 includes notes from the designers about each cover.  

Vyki Hendy and Eric Wilder have chosen  — with input from designers Erin Fitzsimmons and Stuart Bache — 25 of the year’s covers for SPINE Magazine

Jarry Lee chose 32 “of the most beautiful book covers of 2016” for BuzzFeed.

And last but not least, Paste’s selections includes “a few novelette and short story covers.

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Cynan Jones Covers by Jenny Grigg

dig-design-jenny-grigg

I’m a little late to work of Welsh novelist Cynan Jones, but I recently finished reading his award-winning 2014 novel The Dig, and it’s not hard to see what all the fuss is about. The writing is beautifully spare and intimate, and the story is devastating.1

The stark, illustrated cover of The Dig and Jones’s earlier books, recently republished by Granta, also caught my eye. The striking designs are, it turns out, by the brilliant Australian designer Jenny Grigg, which seems obvious once you know. Her previous covers for Peter Carey and Ernest Hemingway have similarly bold simplicity and tone.

Grigg has also designed the cover of Jones’s new novel, The Cove, which will be published by Granta in November.

cove-design-by-jenny-grigg

 

everything-i-found-design-jenny-grigg

long-dry-design-jenny-grigg

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Girlboss Isabel Urbina Peña

The smart and talented Isabel Urbina Peña talks to Girlboss about YES, EQUAL and her work as a book cover designer:

you go to the editorial meeting and you hear the editors talk about the book. After that, you tell your art director which books you want to work on, and sometimes she would suggest stuff to us. You didn’t always get the book that you wanted, but you kind of had an idea. But sometimes it doesn’t go that way. Like for Dave Eggers. No one wanted to take his book! He has very specific taste. But I was like, “Fuck it! I’ll do it.” Because when am I going to be able to design for Dave Eggers again?! And it went really well, actually. One round and it was done, which never happens [laughs]… normally, it’s a battle. You want to try and see what will get through. So you’re like, “Well I’m only going to show three things, because if I show more…” Like for example, for All Our Names, we only showed one. I’d made a bunch of other options, but Peter Mendelsund, who was art directing was like, “Nope. Let’s just show this one”… Sometimes it works like that. But I mean, for another project, I came up with 20 different ideas, and nothing came of it. It was a paperback and they just ended up adapting the hard cover.

You can read my 2014 Q & A with Isabel here.

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All the Books

Assault design Oliver Munday

At Literary Hub, Designer Oliver Munday discusses his design process and reading the whole text:

As designers, we are forced to read quickly, and incisively, mining for the clues to the coveted iconic cover. It can feel careless at times, leading me to believe that my reading skills are being dulled. I think of the author in this process, and in some ways the guilt that I may feel about a less-than-ideal reading of their text is exceeded by the potential of presenting their book with the best possible jacket, one that their audience of ideal readers will appreciate. A cover that feels simultaneously unexpected and inevitable.

I used to aspire to a process that created an expanse for reading each text, one that merged the ideal-designer and ideal-reader into one, but found the boundaries of distinction too severely marked. It would be amazing to have the time, space, and inclination to read an entire text when designing its cover, but I have realized that is not essential. There may be times when my two selves are reconciled, but in the event that they exist separately, a reading designer, divided against himself, will remain standing.

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A Window onto a Window

photograph by Ike Edeani
photograph by Ike Edeani

In this profile of Peter Mendelsund in the June issue of Rhapsody Magazine, there is a lovely bit about the designer’s architect-artist father:

In the living room of Knopf associate art director Peter Mendelsund’s Upper Manhattan apartment, inspiration is everywhere: a battered, sea-green first edition of Ulysses; a toy version of the rocket Tintin takes to the moon; the vertebra of a blue whale; and, on top of his baby grand piano, a wooden model of a convention center made by his father, in the mid-’70s, when he worked for a New York architecture firm. It was never built, because the firm didn’t win the competition (Renzo Piano did), nor were any of his other models, because, in his late 30s, Benjamin Mendelsund was diagnosed with a brain tumor and devoted the rest of his life—he died at 48—to sculpture and painting. “He cut out all the bureaucracy of architecture,” Mendelsund says, “and turned to this.” He points to a small canvas painted entirely black except for two rectangles—two faded photos of a barn’s loft, its window open to the bright of day.

That image of a window onto a window is central to the signature style that’s made Mendelsund one of our preeminent book jacket designers: geometric, fascinated with negative space, striving to capture infinity through simplicity. You see the painting echoed in his cover for Martin Amis’s 2006 novel, House of Meetings, for which he photographed a tiny simulacrum of a room, its perspective slanting toward a miniature door. You see it in his many book jackets with drop-cuts—holes carved out of an image—like the diamond torn from a woman’s face on an early cover for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, back in 2005 when it was called The Man Who Hated Women. And you see it in his May 11, 2015, New Yorker cover, which features an American flag smashed like a storefront window, a single star-shaped hole evoking the myriad emotions of last year’s civil unrest in Baltimore.

His father’s second act as an artist also helps explain how, at 33, Mendelsund had the confidence to abandon his career as a classical pianist (“Eventually, I realized that I’d never truly be world class”) and reinvent himself. His wife suggested he try something visual—he was always drawing; he had designed their wedding invitation. “Sometimes the obvious things take a long time to see.”

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Roy Kuhlman Archive

Early this week I posted about the Robert Brownjohn online archive created by his daughter, Eliza. Today, a new website dedicated to the work of the graphic designer Roy Kuhlman curated by his daughter, Arden Kuhlman Riordan, has gone live.

Kuhlman is best known, of course, for the brilliant mid-century modern book covers he designed for Grove Press. The site is not comprehensive — at least not yet — but given the number of covers  and other pieces Kuhlman must have designed over his career that is, perhaps, not surprising. Archiving his work must be a massive undertaking. Hopefully there is much more to come.

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Jason Booher Interviewed at The Perch

Last Magazine design Jason Booher

Jason Booher, designer and art director of Blue Rider Press and Plume, talks to Penguin Random House blog The Perch about the book cover design process:

A design can be thought of as a set of constraints or parameters. In book design, these consist of things like the conceptual literary content of the book, what makes the book unique in the context of other similar books or all books, how the author is (or is not) known, the expectations of the book from the point of view of the author/editor/sales force/readers, the context of book jacket in the contemporary moment, the context of book jackets in the last 10 (or even 20) years, visual pop culture. Or something that is obvious and not obvious is working with type is very difficult. And it perhaps the most specialized thing that graphic designers bring to that general problem solving into form.

Jason also describes how he approaches a book cover:

There’s a combination of reading the manuscript, and listening to the editor talk about the book. As an art director, I have to dip into almost all the of the books to see what they are like before deciding to whom to give each title. As a designer (if I’m working on that title’s jacket) it’s always different with every book. But as a general process I will read the book, and think and sketch, and sketch, and reread, work though a number of ideas, throw most of them out, stay with others, reread, take a walk (much harder when you are also the art director), try to come up with something new. Those are the first steps.

And how he works with other designers:

When I work with a freelancer (as well as with my in-house designers), I like to see what they come up with without any input from me. Not only are you more likely to get something special and surprising, something you couldn’t have thought of yourself (which is why art directors work with a variety of freelancers in addition to their in-house staff), but you are sending a signal of trust. If a designer knows what “kind” of design they are expected to deliver, they might not push very far or hard. But if they take ownership of being the first arbiters of what the package of the book might be, there is more of a chance for something brilliant. I’m just trying to maximize the talent I have working with me.

With my in house staff, it is similar but there might also be a concept that is floating that we will work with. Or occasionally I’ll work with one designer or my whole team to come up with  ideas together. That’s an exception though, and cover design is generally a sole enterprise in the initial stages. Then it becomes a collaboration when I see comps, and goes from there.

Read the whole interview here.

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