A powerful cover for June 23 2023 edition of Guardian Weekly. Art direction by Andrew Stocks.
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Published June 29, 2023
Tragedy After Tragedy
Tag: covers
Published May 23, 2023
R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Perennial”
It feels like we are right on the cusp of spring turning into summer here in Toronto (rain all day Saturday, beautiful sunshine Sunday) so I enjoyed R. Kikuo Johnson’s latest cover illustration for The New Yorker. There are so many lovely touches.
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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 August 27, 2021
Better Luck Next Month
Apologies — I don’t know who the designer for Businessweek Europe is (let me know if you do!), but the cover of the August 30th edition touched a nerve. I am sure anyone who intended to go back to the office at some point will relate… (via Ian Birch, author of Uncovered: Revolutionary Magazine Covers).
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Published April 30, 2021
Book Covers of Note, April 2021
A bit too much going on this month for my liking, but no shortage of great covers…
Car Crash by Lech Blaine; design by Design by Committee (Black Inc. / March 2021)
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner; design by Na Kim (Knopf / April 2021)
This reminded me of Lynn Buckley‘s cover from a while back for On the Noodle Road by Jen Lin-Liu.
Dirt by Bill Buford; design by Gabriele Wilson (Vintage / April 2021)
The Free World by Louis Menand; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / April 2021)
From a Taller Tower by Seamus McGraw; design by Alex Camlin (University of Texas Press / April 2021)
Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian; design by Stephanie Ross; illustration by Sky Goodies (Penguin Press / April 2021)
Namesake by Adrienne Young; design by Kerri Resnick; photograph by Sveltana Belyaeva (Wednesday Books / March 2021)
This is, of course, only half the picture… Fable was published in September and featured in my 2020 YA cover round-up posted in January.
Nancy by Bruno Lloret; design by Gabriele Wilson (Two Lines Press / April 2021)
New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja; design by Rodrigo Corral (Simon & Schuster / March 2021)
Two New York covers for Mr. Corral this month.
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing by Hannah Dawson; design by Olga Kominek (Penguin Classics / March 2021)
Oculta by Maya Motayne; design by Aurora Parlagreco and Jenna Stempel-Lobell; art by Mark Van Leeuwen (Balzer & Bray / April 2021)
The cover of Nocturna, the previous book in the series, was featured in my 2019 YA round-up.
Red Island House by Andrea Lee; design by Tristan Offit (Scribner / March 2021)
Refugee by Emmanuel Mbolela; design by Eva Gabrielsen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / April 2021)
The Revelations by Erik Hoel; design by Alex Merto (Abrams / April 2021)
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White; design by Jason Ramirez (W. W. Norton / April 2021)
2034 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis; design by Christopher Brian King (Penguin Press / March 2021)
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin; design Luke Bird (Open Letter / April 2021)
I believe this cover was originally used in the UK last year for the Daunt Books edition, but I missed it. Open Letter are publishing the book in the US and Canada this month, so that’s as good as an excuse as any to post the cover now.
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Published April 8, 2021
R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Delayed”
Published October 30, 2020
“VOTE” Shepard Fairey Cover for TIME
TIME has replaced the logo on its cover for the first time. The artwork is by Shepard Fairey.
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Published September 25, 2020
Bob Staake’s “Icons”
Bob Staake’s new cover for The New Yorker commemorates Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died aged 87 last week.
It brought to mind Stephanie Ross’s cover for the 2018 biography of Ginsberg by Jane Sherron De Hart published by Knopf, which also focused on her lace collar.
Published June 18, 2020
American Uprising
Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, artist Kadir Nelson explains how he illustrated the July 2020 cover of Rolling Stone to accompany Jamil Smith’s cover story on Black Lives Matter.
Nelson also illustrated the cover of June 22 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine has an interactive version of the cover, entitled “Say Their Names”, on their site.
Published May 7, 2020
Chris Ware’s “Still Life”
“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”
Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic.
Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.
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Published January 27, 2019
Book Covers of Note January 2019
Here are this month’s book covers of note. Better late than never I suppose! (And so much for that New Year’s Resolution to better at blogging in 2019!). I’ll be starting on February’s post next week…
Cusp by Josephine Wilson; design by Alissa Dinallo (UWA Publishing / August 2018)
Starting my first 2019 covers post with a book from 2018 is not ideal, is it? Ah well… Take a look at some of the rejected covers on Alissa’s Instagram.
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker; design by Anna Kochman (Random House / January 2019)
Holy Lands by Amanda Sthers; design by Tree Abraham (Bloomsbury / January 2019)
Joy Enough by Sarah McColl; design by Catherine Casalino (Liveright / January 2019)
Maid by Stephanie Land; design by Amanda Kain (Hachette / January 2019)
You guys are weird…
Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin; design by Alex Merto (Scribner / May 2018)
The cover of the UK edition of Maid, published by Trapeze, also features rubber gloves FWIW. Sadly I don’t know who designed it.
McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh; design by Ben Denzer (Penguin / January 2019)
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin; design by Stephen Brayda (Riverhead / January 2019)
No! by Charles Nemeth; design by James Paul Jones (Atlantic Books / January 2019)
Not Working by Josh Cohen; design by Matthew Young (Granta / January 2019)
I saw this in a bookstore on a recent visit to the UK. It stood out in a display of new nonfiction. I think it was the doodle-like looseness of the approach that initially caught my eye, but I also like that it feels like a parody of the contemporary nonfiction cover template.
Old Newgate Road by Keith Scribner; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / January 2019)
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma; design by Gray318 (Little, Brown & Company / January 2019)
Jon also designed the cover of Chigozie Obioma’s previous novel The Fishermen:
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; design by Gray318 (Pushkin Press / February 2015)
The cover of the UK edition of An Orchestra of Minorities, published by Little, Brown, was designed by Nico Taylor.
Also in the UK, Pushkin Press have a new edition of The Fishermen with a cover by Anna Morrison:
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; design by Anna Morrison (Pushkin Press / January 2019)
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; design by Gray318 (Pushkin Press / February 2015)
Salt On Your Tongue by Charlotte Runcie; design by Gray318 (Canongate / January 2019)
Savage Frontier by Matthew Carr; design by Dan Mogford (Hurst / November 2018)
The Soprano Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall; design by Mike McQuade (Abrams / January 2019)
To the River by Don Gillmor; design by Five Seventeen (Random House Canada / December 2018)
The Wall by John Lanchester; design by Alex Kirby (Faber & Faber / January 2019)
The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander; design by Kelly Blair (Knopf / January 2019)
Published January 2, 2018
The Rest of the Best 2017
Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’s better than the last one, eh? But before we finally bid adieu to 2017 and toss it onto the flaming garbage fire, here’s are some of the other lists that looked back at the year in book cover design…
We Are Okay by Nina Lacour; design by Samira Iravani; illustration by Adams Carvalho (Dutton / February 2017)
The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil; design by Nick Misani (Grove Press / September 2017)
Spine Magazine were ahead of the pack — as they have been all year — with their eclectic list of 50 ‘Book Covers We Loved’.
The End by Fernanda Torres; design by Strick & Williams (Restless Books)
The Show That Never Ends by Dave Weigel; design by Tal Goretsky (W. W. Norton)
Designer and New York Times Book Review art director Matt Dorfman chose his ‘Best Book Covers of 2017‘ for the Times. Matt’s lists always have a lot of personality, and this one is no exception. I think it’s probably the list I look forward to most, and I suspect it’s also the list that matters most to many American designers too.
Hollow by Owen Egerton; design by Matt Dorfman (Counterpoint / July 2017)
To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann; design by Oliver Munday (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / August 2017)
At Literary Hub, Emily Temple asked 20 of her favourite designers for their picks for best book covers of the year. While Matt Dorfman’s cover design for Hollow by Owen Egerton was the top pick, Oliver Munday was the most popular designer with seven covers on the list.
Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone; design by Jo Walker (Granta / May 2017)
All We Saw by Anne Michaels; design by Janet Hansen; photograph by Jouke Bos (Knopf / October 2017)
CMYK, Vintage UK’s design blog, also posted a short but sweet list of their designers’ favourite covers of the year.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / May 2017)
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa; design by Peter Mendelsund (New Directions / August 2017)
I contributed to two lists (aside from my own) this year. I gave Vulture my two cents for their list of the ’10 Best Book Covers of the Year’.
Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane 2017)
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag; design by Luke Bird (Faber & Faber / April 2017)
And Danny Arter enlisted me as part of a panel to round up the best book covers of 2017 for UK trade magazine The Bookseller. Danny also took a look back at some of the cover design trends of the year for the magazine.
Nicotine by Gregor Hens; design by John Gall (Other Press / January 2017)
When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon; design by Regina Flath (Simon Pulse / May 2017)
You can find my round-up of the year in covers here, and my YA list for 2017 here.
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