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Tag: ireland

Published September 22, 2021

More Jacket and Spine

Design by Anna Morrison

Following on from my post about Jack Smyth earlier this month, I didn’t realise that the interview with Totally Dublin was part of a short series of Q & As with Irish book cover designers (I am not the brightest).

  • Design by Fiachra McCarthy
  • Design by Graham Thew
  • Design by Sarahmay Wilkinson

Anna Morrison and Sarahmay Wilkinson, both of whose work has featured here, and Fiachra McCarthy and Graham Thew, whose work is new to me, also answered the magazine’s questions about their design process.

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Published September 7, 2021

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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Published April 2, 2014

Shape: A Short Film about Design

shape_still_webres_08_0

Shape is a lovely short film about design. Designed and directed by Johnny Kelly, and written by Scott Burnett, the film was commissioned by PIVOT Dublin to encourage young people to think about the world around them and where design fits in:

shape_still_webres_09_0

Kelly and Burnett recently talked to Creative Review about the project:

The duo looked at other recent design films, including Helvetica, Urbanized and Press Pause Play. They also found influence in films from the past, including Why Man Creates by Saul Bass, and “pretty much every educational/informational film made for IBM in the 60s and 70s”, says Burnett. In the end it was Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten that proved most useful. “Powers of Ten did offer the eventual breakthrough but conceptually rather than visually,” says Burnett. “Eventually the only thing that made sense was to zoom out and not make design the subject, but have it instead as the invisible catalyst in the story. Once we realised that then a lot of the early ideas found their way into the story which we just made nice and simple – a day in the life where the changes that are happening around us all the time are made visible.”

You can find out more about the project at SHAPEMAKECHANGE.

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Published June 10, 2011

Something for the Weekend

A lovely new cover design by Dan Mogford for All Over the Map by Michael Sorkin (Verso Books).

In an epic two part interview for Bomb Magazine, George Saunders, author of Pastoralia, talks about writing with Patrick Dacey.

From part one:

[O]ne of the challenges of the writing life is to find new things to say and/or new ways to say them. And this is a paradox, because when you write your first book, you actually carve out a great deal of what you’ll end up working with for the rest of your life… [T]hat’s genuinely exciting. But then there’s the next 60 years to get through (!).

From part two:

Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean that we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc., etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there.

Just as an aside, I love this cover for Pastoralia (I’m not sure who the designer is though. Anyone?):

Mom — A short interview with Gene Hackman in GQ. I’ve always been a fan of Hackman’s acting, what I didn’t realise is that he is also a novelist:

Yeah, they tell you not to write about your mom in books, but I don’t know how you keep from doing that.

Fantastic. Hackman’s most recent novel is Payback at Morning Creek.

And finally…

A gallery of vintage Irish book covers from the 1920’s to 1970’s curated by Niall McCormack, a graphic designer based in Dublin. Pictured above: Cuir Síos Air, Fallons. Cover design by Cor Klaasen. (Via The Donut Project).

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