Books, Design and Culture
Monday’s interview with Paul Buckley wrapped up the first round of my Q & A’s with book designers. I’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of the designers who have participated in the series and I’ve had some great correspondence from designers and non-designers alike who have read the posts. I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks. Thank you. But now the fall book season is well and truly under way now and there’s going to be a (hopefully) short hiatus before the second round of Q & A’s start.
As with round one, I’m hoping to talk to designers who are in different stages of their careers and whose work is interesting and distinctive. I’m very excited about the designers who have already agreed to answer my questions, and I have some ideas about other designers who I’d love to be involved.
Suffice to say it should be good (fingers crossed) — it’s just going to take a little time — so I hope you can be patient while I try and set things up (and juggle life and the day job).
In the meantime, here’s a recap of the great designers I spoke to this summer:
Nate Salciccioli, designer, The DesignWorks Group
Ingsu Liu, VP Art Director, W.W. Norton and Co.
Ingrid Paulson, designer, Ingrid Paulson Design
Michel Vrana, designer, Black Eye Design
Alex Camlin, Creative Director, Da Capo Press
Coralie Bickford Smith, Senior Designer, Penguin Press
Paul Buckley, VP Executive Creative Director, Penguin US
And these two older interviews might also be of interest if you missed them:
Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen, dudes, The Book Cover Archive
Ellen Lupton, designer, writer, editor, educator, Design Writing Research
Thanks.
3 Comments
Vintage Camus — Seen at Bente Miltenburg‘s Flickr photostream (via A Journey Around My Skull).
An Intricate Dance — Author Sonya Chung describes her experience of the cover design process (and the weird — slightly tortured — anxieties that accompany it) for her debut novel Long For This World at The Millions blog (via Duke University Press on Twitter):
I am still a little nervous – having no control over the final printing process, color-correcting, etc. – about what this cover will look like. But I also realized that as each response piled on one after the other in my inbox, I was beginning to delight in the wackiness of the whole thing.
And on a related note, writer Neelanjana Banerjee looks at stereotypical images of Asian Americans on book covers in Hyphen Magazine (issuu document). Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador, makes an interesting general point — which I think is often forgotten — about ‘recognizable codes’:
“Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women’s fiction… The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader.”
GroupThink — After a bit of a hiatus, designer Christopher Tobias is back blogging with a series of discussions on book design:
Beginning today, I plan to post an ongoing series of questions aimed at book designers as a way of opening discussion about various topics related to our industry… Others outside of book design are certainly free to field the questions or give input. I hope that together we can compile a nice collection of discussions for the benefit of those in the profession now and in the future.
Swiss — A bilingual, expandable book designed for the UK art and design gallery Blanka by Dylan Mulvaney: “It honors Josef Müller-Brockmann as well as conveys the principles of Swiss Graphic Design as exemplified by the leader of the revolutionary Swiss Style.” (via SwissMiss and Swiss Legacy).
Good — Christopher Simmons has a quick chat about The Good Design Book project with Grain Edit:
I frequently come back to the definition of design proffered by Charles Eames: “Design is a plan for arranging elements to achieve a particular purpose.” If you break that down, it contains 5 equal parts: the plan (strategy), the arrangement (layout or formalism), the elements (content), the achievement (result) and the purpose (the goal). Good design can therefore be thought of as design based on a good strategy and which features a good arrangement of good content for a good purpose. And of course it needs to yield good results.
And lastly… Following the survey of Mick Wiggins work (mentioned previously here), Caustic Cover Critic discusses those rather lovely Steinbeck covers with the illustrator:
4 CommentsThe Steinbeck gig was about as dreamy a gig as an illustrator can hope to land: 24 covers to date, I think. It was not difficult in the sense of inspiration—he’s so good at evoking mood, and his settings are described so beautifully—but the flop-sweat for me was intense. Steinbeck’s such a classic figure in the literary landscape and bookshelves, delivering art that disappointed was not an option.
