Books, Design and Culture
Working with the legendary Elaine Lustig Cohen, designer Craig Welsh has launched Kickstarter campaign to revive a font originally designed by Alvin Lustig in the 1930s that they’re calling ‘Lustig Elements’. The project is about halfway to its funding goal, but there are only a couple more weeks to back it, so maybe give them a boost if you are fan of the Lustig’s work (and I know you are!):
Comments closedMuch later than usual, here are this month’s book cover selections…
Cambodia Noir by Nick Seeley; design by Alex Merto (Simon & Schuster / March 2016)
Heads by Jesse Jarnow; design by Alex Camlin (Da Capo / March 2016)
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson; design by Cressida Bell (Chatto & Windus / March 2016)
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / March 2016)
Insignificana by Dolan Morgan; design by Alban Fischer (CCM / March 2016)
Knockout by John Jodzio; design by Matt Dorfman (Soft Skull / March 2016)
The Latecomer by Dimitri Verhulst; design Ross Proulx / Doublenaut (Portobello Books / March 2016)
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing; design Henry Sene Yee; photograph by Jerome Liebling (Picador USA / March 2016)
Love Like Salt by Helen Stevenson; design by Nico Talyor; image by Sarah Gillespie (Virago / March 2016)
Lover by Anna Raverat; design by Neil Lang (Picador / March 2016)
Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs; design by Olga Grlic (St. Martin’s Press / March 2016)
Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters; design by Alban Fischer (Dark House Press / February 2016)
The Passion of Mademoiselle S. edited by Jean-Yves Berthault; design Gabriele Wilson (Spiegel & Grau / February 2016)
Seeing Red by Lina Meruane; design by Anna Zylicz (Deep Vellum / March 2016)
Socialist Optimism by Paul Auerbach; design by Emma J. Hardy (Palgrave / March 2016)
Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / March 2016)
The Trees by Ali Shaw; design by David Mann (Bloomsbury / March 2016)
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman; design by Sara Wood (St. Martin’s Press / March 2016)
We’ve Already Gone This Far by Patrick Dacey; design by Lucy Kim (Henry Holt / March 2016)
What Is Not Your Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi; design by Helen Yentus (Riverhead / March 2016)
When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid; design Ceara Elliot; lettering and illustration Martina Flor (Atom / February 2016)
XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century by Campbell McGrath; design Sara Wood (Ecco / March 2016)
On the subject of typography, I missed type designer Tobias Frere-Jones on Design Matters with Debbie Millman at the end of last year:
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At The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright considers the work of Edward Johnson, and visits a new exhibition marking the centenary of his famous typeface for London Underground:
Although sans-serif typefaces (letters without the little flicks at the end of their strokes) date back to the 18th century, Johnston’s Underground typeface can be credited with popularising the style. Indeed, it was so influential that it became the typeface from which every 20th-century sans-serif typeface would be measured. As Gill later wrote in admiration, Johnston “redeemed the whole business of sans-serif from its 19th-century corruption”.
His former student was perhaps driven by the guilt of seeing the success of his own typeface, Gill Sans, which he admitted had been heavily based on Johnston’s work. Promoted and licensed by Monotype, and preloaded into computers, it has become much more widespread than Johnston, which is owned by Transport for London.
“I hope you realise that I take every opportunity of proclaiming the fact that what the Monotype people call Gill Sans owes all its goodness to your Underground letter,” Gill wrote in a letter to Johnston later in life. “It is not altogether my fault that the exaggerated publicity value of my name makes the advertising world keen to call it by the name of Gill.”
Little did it bother Johnston, accidental creator of one of the world’s longest-lasting corporate identities, who was never one for the limelight. When asked to submit a biography for Who’s Who, he was characteristically to the point, listing only three achievements: “Studied pen shapes of letters in early MSS, British Museum, 1898-99. Teacher of the first classes in formal penmanship and lettering, LCC Central School, 1899-1912. Designed block letters based on classical Roman capital proportions (for London Electric Railways), 1916.” But what influential letters they would turn out to be.
The exhibition Underground: 100 Years of Edward Johnston’s Lettering for London opens at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex March 12 and runs until September 11.
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If you follow the Casual Optimist on Twitter, you will know that a couple of weeks ago design studio Aishima asked people to tweet about inspiring women graphic designers using the hashtag #celebratewomen. As today is International Women’s Day, I thought I would follow up my #celebratewomen tweets with a visual list of 52 inspiring women book cover designers (one for every week of the year!) — from influential veterans whose work I’ve admired for years to junior designers that have just appeared on my radar.
The names of all 52 designers can be found at the end of the post. With a few more hours in a day the list could easily have been many times longer, so apologies to anyone I have overlooked. Please let me know who you would’ve included in the comments or on Twitter.
Gabrielle Bordwin
Terri Nimmo
Ami Smithson / Cabin
Abby Weintraub
Megan Wilson
Congratulations to all the winners and shortlisted covers at the third annual Academy of British Cover Design Awards! Make sure you read Daniel Benneworth-Gray‘s report on last night’s “shindig” at the Creative Review, but in the meantime, all the winning designs are below:
The Fox and the Star, written, illustrated and designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Particular Books / August 2015)
Asking For It by Louise O’Neill; design by Kate Gaughran (Quercus / September 2015)
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar; design by Ben Summers (Hodder / March 2015)
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum; design by Jo Thompson; illustration by Maricor/Maricar (Mantle / March 2015)
Memoirs of a Dipper by Nell Leyshon; design by Gray318 (Fig Tree / June 2015)
Whisky Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer; design by Richard Bravery (Penguin / June 2015)
Egg by Blanche Vaughan; design by Clare Skeats (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson / March 2015)
Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome; design James Paul Jones; illustration by Pietari Posti (Vintage / March 2015)
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy; design by Sinem Erkas (Orion / September 2015)
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus; design by Peter Dyer (Profile Books / November 2015)
You can see all last year’s winners here.
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Some how I missed these when they were first published in 2014,1 but British publisher Fourth Estate has reissued 21 books by J.G. Ballard with covers designed Stanley Donwood. Donwood, who is perhaps best known for his artwork for Radiohead, talked about Ballard and the cover designs on the 4th Estate blog:
I have done many strange things in order to design these covers; I’ve visited underground laboratories, watched the huge sky under the Fens, ignited flammable liquids, fired guns, melted quantities of wax, poured liquid nitrogen across a table and taken deliveries of hypodermic needles.
(via Rhys Tranter)
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Robert Newman interviews mighty Matt Dorfman, illustrator, book cover designer and art director for The New York Times Book Review, for American Illustration:
I’m a big disciple of using abstraction to highlight emotional conditions. To that end, I love the kitchen sink perversion of psych artists like Victor Moscoso, Martin Sharp, Tadanori Yokoo and Keiichi Tanaami. As a teen I swiped a copy of I Seem To Be A Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller and Quentin Fiore from one of my dad’s shelves (and I still have it) and I credit that book with revealing to me—loudly—how vital books can be if they’re conceived with passion and energy. And I probably owe the Johns Heartfield and Baldessari some money.
At least once a month, a circumstance will arise either in work or in life in which I reflexively ask myself, without premeditation: “What would Ian MacKaye do?” This has been happening since I was 15. There’s probably something to it.
(Matt is one of the many, many people I would love to interview for the blog… )
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Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savicevic; design by Sunra Thompson (McSweeney’s / February 2016)
The Encounter: Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / February 2016)
Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / January 2016)
A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab; design by Will Staehle (Tor Books / February 2016)
This is a rather nice riff on Will’s cover for last year’s A Darker Shade of Magic.
In a Land of Paper of Gods by Rebecca Mackenzie; design by Yeti Lambregts (Tinder Press / January 2016)
Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition by Jim MacLaughlin; design by David A. Gee (Pluto Press / February 2016)
Legoland by Gerard Woodward; design by Justine Anweiler; illustration by Axel Bizon and Lena Sarrault (Picador / February 2016)
Liar by Rob Roberge; Jake Nicolella (Crown / February 2016)1
Look at Me by Sarah Duguid; design by Yeti Lambregts (Tinder Press / February 2016)
My Father the Pornographer by Chris Offutt; design by Jamie Keenan (Atria / February 2016)
Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev; design by Liana Finck (New Vessel Press / January 2016)
The Shadow Queen by C. J. Redwine; design Sarah Nichole Kaufman; lettering / apple carving Sean Freeman (Balzer + Bray / February 2016)
A Song for No Man’s Land by Andy Remic; design by Christine Foltzer; illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love (Tor Books / February 2016)
A Song for No Man’s Land is the first book in a trilogy of novellas by Andy Remic. All three books have covers illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love — you can read his process at Tor.com.
Superabundance by Heinz Helle; design by Jamie Keenan (Profile / February 2016)
Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin; design by Sarah Nichole Kaufman (Balzer + Bray / February 2016)
Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach; design by Lucy Ruth Cummins; Photography by Keirnan Monaghan, styling by Theo Vamvounakis (Simon and Schuster / February 2016)
Unforgettable by Charlie Maclean; design by Sinem Erkas (self-published / February 2016)
You can read more about the design of this cover on Sinem’s website.
Was She Pretty by Leanne Shapton; design by Leanne Shapton (Drawn & Quarterly / February 2016)
We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom; design by David Drummond (Pluto Press / February 2016)2
You Should Pity Us Instead by Amy Gustine; design by Kristen Radtke (Sarabande Books / February 2016)
At the Penguin Blog, author Julian Barnes and designer Suzanne Dean discuss their 20 year creative relationship with Alex Clark:
“What’s so nice about working with Julian is the trust; I think that’s really important. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than producing something and someone can’t understand what you’re trying to show them. I think over time you build up that trust and you know that I’ll be working my very hardest to give you the best cover I possibly can. I really am so desperate to produce perfection each time and I want it to be better each time.”
You can listen to the full conversation on the Vintage Books podcast:
And you can read more about the cover design of Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Noise of Time, on CMYK, the Vintage design blog.
James Paul Jones‘s unused covers for The Cycling Anthology (pictured above) were some of my favourite designs from 2015. Based on famous cycling jerseys, I liked that they were a nod to insiders, but that you that didn’t need to be a cycling fan to appreciate the stylish minimalism of the designs.
When I learnt that they were passed over in favour of a more traditional, illustrative approach, I asked James about his work on cycling books, and why the jersey covers didn’t go to press.
“I’ve always loved sports but I didn’t count myself a cycling enthusiast until my last year working at Orion Publishing where I was given the job of art directing the photo shoot for David Millar’s book Racing through the Dark,” he told me. “Working with David opened my eyes to the cycling world, and I was lucky enough to work on Sir Bradley Wiggins’ book a couple of years later.”
“Coincidentally David Millar writes beautifully about cycling and has a few essays as part of the Cycling Anthology,” James continued. “I also just finished designing his latest book, The Racer a few months back — all cycling enthusiasts should grab a copy! The contact sheet of ‘tour scars’ is one of my favourite plate sections we’ve ever done, and the back cover features one of the final jerseys he ever wore. Complete with rips, holes and bloody marks from one of his most brutal crashes. As soon as we saw it we knew it had to be featured somewhere, and the photographer captured it brilliantly.”
The Cycling Anthology presented a different kind of challenge, however. Originally self-published, it collects original writing by some of the world’s best writers on the sport, as well as cyclists themselves. Now published by Yellow Jersey Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House), the new volumes of the anthology presented James with an opportunity to repackage the series as a whole, and to experiment with a new look for the covers.
“I wanted to present the editors and authors with two options. A more traditional route, and an option that would hopefully resonate with the cycling community. The jerseys were the latter, and one of the first things I researched. I really wanted to make that connection with the cycling community, and the target market is very design conscious which helps. They are so iconic in the cycling world it just seemed to make perfect sense.”
The design of the first volume was inspired by the world champion rainbow jersey. The second by the famous blue and white Bianchi jersey. Volume three was based on the ‘King of the Mountains’ polka dot jersey and the fourth on the Molteni jersey worn by the great Eddy Merckx. The fifth volume was inspired by the chequered shirt of the French cycling team Peugeot. “There were so many jerseys I wanted to include,” said James. “I also recommend David Sparshott’s poster of Cycling Jerseys for anyone wanting to admire the greats in his signature illustration style. Just gorgeous.”
Despite the obvious appeal of these new designs, the publisher decided to stay with a familiar look to the series. “I think the authors wanted to retain some elements from the original designs, which we did on the final covers with the illustrations, and I’m happy with how they turned out,” James told me. “The illustrations are by the talented Simon Scarsbrook. Volumes 1-3 used the original artwork, and we commissioned Simon to come up with two more illustrations for volumes four and five. He was great to work with and they work really well as a series.”
James kept the stripes from the world champion jersey and used them across all the final covers to help unify the series. “The jersey covers will forever by one of my favourite ‘killed covers’ and I really wish they would have taken a chance on them as I’m sure they would have done the job and more.” Agreed.
Oof. Hello, January. This is all rather soon isn’t it? But here we are, a new month, and another selection of new book covers (with a few ‘old’ ones that I missed in the excitement at the end of 2015). Happy New Year…
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders; design by Will Staehle (Tor Books / January 2016)
Bird by Noy Holland; design by Kelly Winton (Counterpoint / November 2015)
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin; design by Devin Washburn (FSG / January 2016)
The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / January 2016)
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams; design by Dan McKinley (McSweeney’s / January 2016)
A note from the book on the cover art:
“The art on this book’s cover is unsigned and was created for a romance novella published in Mexico City in the 1960s that appeared in serial form. This piece was produced using collage and gouache overpainting on illustration board, and the back reads “El Angel No. 64.” The printer of these covers held on to the originals for decades, and the entire collection was recently purchased from his warehouse. Works are available from the Pardee Collection Gallery of Iowa City, and ‘El Angel’ is provided courtesy of Diane Williams and Wolfgang Neumann.”
Gamelife by Michael W. Clune; design by Alex Merto (FSG / September 2015)
Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson; design Jaya Miceli (Harper / January 2016)
Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor; design by Adly Elewa (Melville House / January 2016)
The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley; design by Andy Pressman (Verso / January 2016)
1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall; design by Alex Kirby (Faber & Faber / Janaury 2016)
A nice US / UK compare and contrast for The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie:
Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie; design by Jo Walker (Fourth Estate / January 2016)
Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie; design by Oliver Munday (Penguin Press / January 2016)
The Prose Factory by D. J. Taylor; design by James Paul Jones (Chatto & Windus / January 2016)
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Sanna Annukka; cover art by Sanna Annukka (Hutchinson / October 2015)
This looks absolutely beautiful, but I’ve seen very little about it online, much less seen it in person. Apparently Sanna Annukka has also illustrated an edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Fir Tree. It looks wonderful too.
Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt; design by Nico Taylor (Corsair / January 2016)
The Stargazer’s Sister by Carrie Brown; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / January 2016)
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral by Robert Westall; design by M.S. Corley (Valancourt Books / December 2015)
13.8 by John Gribbin; design by Shepherd Studio (Icon / October 2015)
This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / January 2016)