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Published March 16, 2011

Charlotte Strick | The Atlantic


Charlotte Strick, art director at Faber & Faber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and The Paris Review, writes about the book design process for The Atlantic:

Even though I frequently have designs for titles from the previous season still on my plate, and just when I think I can’t possibly come up with another original idea for a cover, the creative sparks begin to fly. At the launch meetings, editors take turns presenting recent acquisitions… As the books are introduced, each of us begins to wonder: Will I solve the problem with illustration or photography? If the title is brilliant and descriptive, maybe an all-type treatment that’s bold and clever is the best solution. (These are always my favorites.) Is there even any budget for art after the copy-editing fees, production costs, and author’s advances have been tallied? No? Never mind! We’ll get out our paintbrushes and dust off our cameras and get to work.

She is also interviewed by The Atlantic’s Daniel Fromson:

Everyone has an opinion on whether or not the book publishing world as we know it is doomed. Just as the design of websites was becoming more interesting and thoughtful by the late ’90s, it’s clear that the look and feel of e-books will transform over the next decade. As a designer who makes her living creating covers for actual books, I hope to take part in this. I don’t want our work to be reproduced exclusively in black and white or viewed only at postage stamp size.

(Pictured above: sketches by Chris Silas Neal for the cover of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, by Claire Dederer, published by FSG)

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Published March 15, 2011

A Brief History of Title Design

Ian Albinson of the excellent The Art of the Title Sequence put together this short collection of film titles for the SXSW “Excellence in Title Design” competition screening:

(via Coudal)

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Published March 11, 2011

Amazing Things Will Happen

“Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality, it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, it’s just true!”

Jacob Gilbreath, a graphic design student at Oklahoma State University, created this great kinetic typography project — inspired by Lou Dorfsman’s Gastrotypographicalassemblage — from the dialogue of Conan O’Brien’s farewell on The Tonight Show on NBC:

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Published March 10, 2011

Chip Kidd: A Drinker and a Crier

Chip Kidd, book designer and associate art director at A.A. Knopf, profiled at Stodgy is Sexy:

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Published March 9, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Two stunningly minimal designs by Rodrigo Corral for New Directions.

Faceout Books is back after a hiatus. First up, an interview with Jennifer Heuer about her design for Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez.

Haystacks of Needles — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on situational overload versus ambient overload:

Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.

The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.

The Case for the Novella — The New York Times Magazine has an excerpt from “The Three-Day Weekend Plan,” an essay by John Brandon from the new book The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (Soft Skull):

Bluntly, the novella is in its Golden Age as a form right now because no one is beating it with a stick until nickels fall out. So my plan for the novella is — drum roll: Do nothing. Or do whatever little is required to steward the status quo. Let’s agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella.

And on the subject of The New York Times Magazine…

The Speed of Change — Former Design Director for NYTimes.com Khoi Vinh on the new design of the New York Times Magazine:

Digital publishing is supposed to be much quicker than print publishing, but this… suggests that more important than the speed of medium is the nimbleness of the business behind it. The print side of The New York Times takes a lot of good natured ribbing for being slow to publish news, but it’s still very, very good at what it does. Which is to say that few organizations can publish on a weekly basis and still effect the kind of major change that this redesign represents.

In some ways, the digital side of the business is not as nimble as that. To be sure, few companies can execute digital publishing as well as The New York Times… But partly because the medium is much younger and constantly changing, partly because best practices are less well-defined, and partly because the mission is more diffuse, execution is a more intricate, protracted and, often, inefficient affair on the digital side.

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Published March 7, 2011

The Breaking of Eggs: One Book, Three Covers

Books published in both the US and UK will often have different covers in each country. The UK and the US are, after all, two nations divided by a common language. Even so, I was still quite surprised by just how different the cover of UK paperback edition The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (forthcoming from Orion, above right) was from the cover US edition of the same book (published by Penguin, above left).

It was Dan Mogford the designer of the UK paperback who pointed me in the direction of the original US cover, designed by Gregg Kulick. I had, it turned out, seen Gregg’s cover before — it had caught my eye in Paul Buckley’s book Penguin 75 — I just hadn’t realized it was the same book that Dan had just designed the cover for!

As Dan and Gregg’s treatments were so different, I thought it might be informative to ask them both about their designs. In the process, I came across Nathan Burton’s design for the UK hardcover edition of The Breaking of Eggs (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, above middle) — another, altogether different, interpretation of the same story. I thought it would be interesting to ask Nathan what he remembered from his design brief as well.

I’m grateful to all three designers for sharing their thoughts on their very different directions…

Gregg Kulick:

The Breaking of Eggs is the story of an old curmudgeon who learns to take down all of the walls he built around himself and really enjoy life. As a child, he flees Poland to escape the war and settles in France. As an adult he becomes a travel writer who focuses on the old communist block and is very much a communist himself. The rest of the world and its excesses annoy him and he shuts himself out. Slowly he breaks down the walls and visits his lost brother in America.

The title refers to a Joseph Stalin quote “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” and could be used as a metaphor for his own life. Or he as a child, he could also have been one of the broken eggs. Regardless, it was his mind that needed to be broken in order to live a truly full life. Which, is why I chose that imagery. The giant exclamation point was a homage to Rodchenko, who was a huge influence on my design as a student and who often used them in his design.

The map in the background just represents some of the places he wrote about as a travel writer. This was more of a request from editorial to show “place” on the cover and I think it was a very nice suggestion.

Nathan Burton:

The publisher had tried a photographic route previously to commissioning me which hadn’t worked so they wanted an alternative approach. Buzz words they came up with were: cafe, espresso, napkin, beer, handwritten notes, cigarette smoke, a guide book on a table, a train. It was a case of combining this with a nod toward an Eastern European aesthetic to come up with the final design.

Dan Mogford:

The previous incarnations of the jacket – on both sides of the Atlantic – had all been fairly quirky and lighthearted and the publishers were keen to open this book up to a different audience. Orion were quite specific about the direction they wanted to go with this – the phrase ‘traditional, sophisticated literary fiction’ was mentioned a few times!

The focus for this version of the jacket was to be the protagonist’s early year’s in Lodz, Poland around 1939 when he was abandoned by his mother. The brief asked for ‘a lonely looking boy in an urban Polish setting ideally with a woman walking away from him’ – this highly specific request meant I was looking at a composite image from the start, it was really a case of finding the right elements within a variety of period photographs then assembling them to tell the story you see in the final composition.

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Published March 4, 2011

LetterMpress

LetterMpress is a project by graphic designer John Bonadies to create a virtual letterpress environment for the iPad that will allow users to create authentic-looking letterpress designs and prints:

The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print. You will be able to create unlimited designs, with multiple colors, using authentic vintage wood type and art cuts. And you can print your design directly from LetterMpress or save it as an image for import it into other applications.

The project has already reached its initial Kickstarter funding target to purchase complete collections of wood type, but no doubt additional funds will be useful. The type that acquired by LetterMpress will be housed at a new letterpress co-op called the “Living Letter Press” and project organizers plan to offer authentic letterpress prints from designs submitted by users in future.

(thanks Sio)

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Published March 1, 2011

Q & A with David Drummond, Salamander Hill Design

“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it…. It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me…” — Paul Rand

There is something of a Modernist tendency in the design of David Drummond. It is not in a strict adherence to the grid or Accidentz Grotesk (or anything quite so obvious), but rather in the thought and purpose underlying his work. There is always a clarity and assurance to the concept and composition. There is never erroneous detail or ornament. Form most definitely follows function. To describe David’s work this way, however, is something of an injustice. His designs are far wittier (and much less pedantic) than one thinks Modernism ought to be.  But then again, whoever said Modernism couldn’t be funny or irreverent? Not Paul Rand.

Perhaps it is simply better to say that David’s designs are the epitome of good ideas well executed. Their apparent effortlessness make it easy to underestimate his work. It is only when one tries to imagine how the cover could have looked otherwise that you truly realise his originality and what he has rejected or removed to get to his apparently simple designs. It should not be a surprise that Paul Rand is inspiration. After all, it was Rand who said:

“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”

Somehow that seems to get to the core of David’s work.

I am absolutely thrilled to post this interview. David’s work has received awards from AIGA, Communication Arts Magazine and Print Magazine and he is one of the finest book cover designers working today.

We corresponded by email.

How did you get into book design?
I was working in Montreal for an ad agency when I got a call from McGill-Queen’s University Press.  On the recommendation of my sister, whose book they were publishing, they were interested in looking at my portfolio. That was the catalyst to start breaking out on my own.

When did you open your own studio?
I opened Salamander Hill Design in 2001

Approximately how many publishers do you work with?
I just checked the folder on my computer titled “Presses” and there are about 40 in there. Some are very active and some not at all. It kind of goes up down. Some of them are self published authors as well. There are maybe about 10 that I have longstanding relationships with that feed me with work pretty regularly.

How many covers do you work a season?
Hard to say really. I have so many that are all at varying stages of production. Right now, if I count the books on my list, there are about 30. What I have come to realize is that it is really important for me to always have a lot of work on the go. It helps to keep me in the zone where I can do my best work. I really do think the creative faculty is like a muscle that you have to keep flexing.

You were previously an art director for a marketing and communications company. Has this informed your book cover design?
This is going to sound funny but I wouldn’t really describe myself as a book cover designer. My approach to cover design is pretty much the same that I apply to any area of visual communication. I see the project as solving a visual problem, whether it is a book cover, illustration, logo or package design. Even though I have always entered work in book cover design competitions through the years, it has also been equally important for me to enter competitions like Communication Arts Design Annual to have the work judged in the larger context of graphic design as a whole.

Do you still do corporate identity work and packaging design?
Lately I have been getting back into identity work more and more. I guess I must have been missing it. Last year I decided to branch out and do some illustration work for magazines and that has been really exciting. The tight deadlines and fast turn-arounds force you to make decisions faster. I really hope to develop that more this year. Just last week someone e-mailed me about doing a poster for film festival in Italy. It always amazes me when a job like that lands in your in-box out of the blue.

Could you describe your book cover design process?
In a nutshell: present the cover brief to yourself as a problem that has to be solved. Then I try and bombard my brain with images from all kinds of sources to see if I can trigger something. For me it is about finding the visual hook. If that doesn’t work right away I tend to put it aside and take my dog Beau for a walk. I am sure all the local farmers that pass me on the road in their pick-up trucks must wonder about me and my dog walking far from home in all kinds of weather but I would honestly say it is an important part of my creative process.

I tend to like showing one concept whenever possible. I would say this is true for all of my design work. It shows the client that you have taken a stand and believe in the solution. That doesn’t mean you haven’t produced many different concepts along the way. I am sort of brutally self critical and if something isn’t working or if I am forcing it too much I put it aside and start again. I work with a lot of different clients with different protocols and some of them require that multiple concepts be presented up front. When that is the case I still try and make a strong case for the one I believe in.

I think the key to doing your best work is having a great client relationship. My brother is a poet and he compares publishing a book of poems to launching a pebble off the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sound of it hitting the bottom to come back to you. That is a bit the way I feel when I start working for a new client when you aren’t familiar with their approval process. Sometimes you launch your design out there and then — silence. I have a relationship with most of my clients where I know they want to be surprised by a solution. It does set the bar high each time but I need that challenge.

My wife works as a horse groom for a big show barn and gets up at 5:00 in the morning to get ready for work. Consequently I start my day around the same time. It’s funny — I live in farm country and basically keep farmer’s hours. The lights are also on in the neighbouring barns when I start my day. I focus on idea generation in those early hours and leave the more mundane production stuff to later in the day when my energy is flagging.  The Tron, Inception, Dark Knight soundtracks come in handy at that point to keep me going.

What are your favourite books to work on?
Hard to say really. For the nonfiction stuff I love working on covers that have a great title that presents the subject in a new way. That really tends to help get the ball rolling.

What are the most challenging?
Books on the economy/Wall Street, Canadian Federalism, the Supreme Court, Native Peoples. I say this because I have done so many of them and each time you have to find a new way of presenting it. So far I have always managed to find a new take on it. I keep going back to the well and so far it hasn’t gone dry.

Do you see any current trends in book design?
Not a big fan of trends. Whenever I have been asked to judge design work for competitions the work that always grabs you are the ones that present a strong concept with a clean and simple execution. I think that is the key to producing work that is timeless.

Where do you look for inspiration, and who are some of your design heroes?
I look for inspiration pretty much everywhere. Paul Rand is a big design hero of mine because he kept on creating right to the end. I pretty much knew early on in my career that, because I’m such an oddball, the path of becoming creative director in a big agency was not really an option — not much of a schmoozer.

For me it has always been about the work.

Who else do you think is doing interesting work right now?
So many designers really. I would probably choose designers outside of the book design world like Montreal design firm Paprika — their work never ceases to surprise me.

What does the future hold for book cover design?
I truly feel privileged to get up in the morning and find a new design brief for a cover design in my in-box. Doing this type of work is a perfect fit for me and I hope to continue doing it for as long as it lasts.

And lastly… You (somewhat famously) live in a rural municipality in Quebec with a population of less than 500 people. What can you see from your studio window?
I live in a big rambling farmhouse built in 1825 on about 140 acres of land in Elgin, Quebec. The back fence line is the American border. Our farm sits at the base of the Adirondacks just where the Chateauguay Valley begins. My office is on the second floor with a view out the back. The view is always changing. Depending on the time of the year there are sheep, cows, horses, wild turkeys, deer, and an assortment of barn cats outside my window.

Wonderful! Thanks David.

David’s work can be seen at his blog and at the website for Salamander Hill Design.

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Published February 20, 2011

Penguin Great Food | Coralie Bickford-Smith

The Creative Review has an early look at three of the covers for Penguin’s Great Food paperback series to be released in April.

Designed by the wonderful Coralie Bickford-Smith, each cover draws on a decorative ceramic style relevant to the period of the writing.

Meanwhile, in new article for Fast Company Coralie talks about the inspiration behind her book covers:

“I want these books to be cherished like the literature inside,” says Bickford-Smith of her obsessive attention to detail. “If something is well considered, it will entice. People want to explore it, feel it. That design shines through and connects.”

And, if you missed it, my Q & A with Coralie from 2009 is here.

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Published February 14, 2011

James Gallager | Cutting Edges

Here’s an interview with the New York-based artist James Gallagher, curator of an exhibition of contemporary collage called Cutters (currently on display at the West Cork Arts Centre in Ireland, February 7th-March 12th) and co-editor of the book  Cutting Edges published by Gestalten:

The book include collages by John Gall, Art Director at Vintage and Anchor Books, who actually mentioned the work of James Gallagher in our recent Q & A.

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Published February 11, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Steven Heller, editor of I Heart Design and author/editor of countless other books about design, at 10 Answers.

And Steven Heller is one of the designers featured in BBC Radio documentary I Heart Milton Glaser about the iconic I (Heart) NY logo and the designer who created it (go listen now because it’s only available for a few more days).

Print and the City –a fascinating look at whether movable type printing presses were the drivers of economic growth in cities by Jeremiah Dittmar (via The Browser):

[C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses… Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward pressure on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants.

In the pre-industrial era, commerce was a more important source of urban wealth and income than tradable industrial production. Print media played a key role in the development of skills that were valuable to merchants. Following the invention printing, European presses produced a stream of math textbooks used by students preparing for careers in business.

The Savage Marketplace — A really interesting and thoughtful survey of the current state of book editing in the UK by Alex Clark , with contributions from Diana Athill, Blake Morrison, Jeannette Winterson and others, for The Guardian:

[W]hat saps the spirit are the manuscripts that leave you with the question: why did no one sit down with the writer and point out where this isn’t working? Why didn’t a red pen mark the hackneyed phrase, or the stock character, or the creaky dialogue? And, sometimes, why didn’t someone deliver the unfortunate verdict: this simply isn’t ready yet, and may never be?

And finally, if you’re in London… Kemistry Gallery have an exhibition of film posters by Saul Bass from the BFI archive, February 17th to March 17th:

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

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Published February 9, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Atrocity Exhibition — Rick Poynor on the book covers  and other visual interpretations of J.G. Ballard at Design Observer:

The repeated failure of editors, designers and illustrators to engage intellectually with The Atrocity Exhibition is all the more remarkable because the book offers a litany of Ballardian images: bunkers, concrete causeways, jutting balconies, crashed bombers, a drained sculpture fountain, a deserted beach resort, rubber mannequins and plastic dummies, as well as more ambiguous images such as a “conceptual auto disaster” or a “spinal landscape” — quite apart from its erotic content.

See also: James Pardey’s essay on David Pelham’s Ballard covers for Penguin.

Cock of the Walk — Publisher Benedikt Taschen profiled in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Taschen admits he puts too much love and attention into his creations to ever go into the orbit of mass publishing, adding that he wants to make collectibles, not disposables. “Most books look so s— and dispassionately done; they are disposable from the beginning,” says the publisher. “Their books are not designed to become significant objects, so most books have no identity, no soul. I’m not saying all, but the vast majority [of publishing houses], with a few exceptions, have lost their profile and personality. It doesn’t look like they have spent a lot of care and love.”

(Says the publisher of The Big Butt Book book…)

A wonderful gallery of book trade labels.

See also: Book trade labels in the collection of Crossett Library Bennington College (via @shelfappeal).

The Lure of Lists — Literature professor Jeremy Dauber on the attraction of literary lists for More Intelligent Life:

Looking at the books double-stacked on shelves in my office, I can check off their provenance one by one: New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010; 500 Essential Graphic Novels; Harold Bloom’s guide at the end of The Western Canon; the awards list at the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards; and the National Yiddish Book Centre’s 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature. The stacks include the occasional recommendation of a friend or an impulse buy, but those are the exceptions to the list-derived rule.

And finally…

…On the list of all things awesome, BLDGBLOG interviewing Hellboy creator Mike Mignola ranks pretty highly (thanks @derekmurr):

I have never done a story in a shopping mall because, even if I’m not drawing it myself, I don’t want to see somebody draw a shopping mall. In the Hellboy world, and in other things I’ve done, those places almost don’t exist. When I do Eastern Europe—and I’ve been to Eastern Europe, and I’ve seen the shopping malls and the god-awful housing projects and things, and there are horror stories that take place in there, I have no doubt—but I gravitate toward the classic, clichéd, spooky places, whether they truly exist in this world or not.

See also: Hellboy: The Whittier Legacy in USA Today.

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