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Tag: john gall

Published June 15, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

An interview with the talented Allison Colpoys, book designer at Penguin Books Australia, at The Design Files.

Particular Beasts — A brief interview with art director John Gall about teaching book design:

Each book is its own particular beast that has to be designed from the ground up. Every designer has their own way of looking at the problem and coming up with a solution. It can’t help but be personal on some level.

A Twist, Flourish or Quirk — Louise Fili and Steven Heller, authors of Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age, on script typefaces at Design Observer:

During the letterpress era [script typefaces] were in such great demand that many people “invented” them, and many others copied them. In some commercial printing shops, composing cases filled with scripts were stacked floor to ceiling to the exclusion of other type. Printers routinely amassed multiple styles of the heavy metal type fonts, each possessing a distinct twist, flourish or quirk, used to inject the hint of personality or dash of character to quotidian printed pieces… Scripts signaled propriety, suggested authority yet also exuded status and a bourgeois aesthetic. The wealthy classes couldn’t get enough fashionable scripts in their diet.

The Pilot Fish and The Whale — David Carr, media columnist at the New York Times, talks about the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin  for Interview Magazine:

I think one of the things that Page One does an amazing job of demonstrating is the importance of editors. You can see our editor, Bruce Headlam, shaping, arguing, pushing back. Of course, that’s what you don’t have a lot of in the blogosphere. There is nobody pushing people to support what they’re saying, nobody arguing against the assumptions that are brought to the table…

Slow Journalism — An interview with cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco (Footnotes in Gaza) for the A.V. Club:

[I]t’s one of the slowest art forms or media there is. You know, there’s fast food and there’s the slow food movement; I guess this is slow journalism. It just forces you into it. It’s difficult for me because I love being in the field, so to speak. I love that day-to-day thrill of being in places, and the great privilege of meeting people and going into their homes and seeing what their lives are like. I love that. But when you compare how much time is spent reporting to how much time is spent at a desk just writing and drawing, the reporting is a fraction. That’s just the way it is.

And finally…

Sing Out — Dorian Lynskey, author of 33 Revolutions per Minute, recommends five books about protest songs. The cover of 33 Revolutions per Minute was designed by Jacob Covey.

http://www.bookdepository.com/Footnotes-Gaza-Joe-Sacco/9780805092776/?a_aid=optimist
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Published May 15, 2011

Killed

Last Thursday The New York Times hosted an exhibition of rejected book jacket designs called ‘Killed Covers’. Fortunately for those of us who don’t live in New York they’ve also posted a gallery of 20 covers from the show.

(Pictured above left: design by Roberto de Vicq, Wetlands. Right: design by John Gall and Leanne Shapton, Autograph Man)

(thx Henry / Alan)

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Published March 31, 2011

Kazuo Ishiguro | Jamie Keenan

The super-talented Jamie Keenan has done a beautiful redesign for Vintage’s Kazuo Ishiguro backlist. You can see them in their full glory at Art Director John Gall’s blog Spine Out.

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Published March 26, 2011

Something for the Weekend

“It Looks Pretty Cool” — Chip Kidd on his design for Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84:

logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment.

F**ked — Author Dale Peck on founding  Mischief + Mayhem, a new publishing collective, in The Financial Times:

“The whole point of writing literature was that in exchange for not getting paid a lot of money, you could say whatever you wanted; now, you don’t get a lot of money and you don’t get to say what you want. All of which segues to why writing is f***ed.”

The Last of the Old-Style Hollywood Actresses — A Ballardian Primer to Elizabeth Taylor:

What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

(images: cropped photograph of Elizabeth Taylor by Bert Stern via Dan Shepelavy (top). Cover of Crash by J.G. Ballard designed by David Wardle).

Too Much Information —The New York Times of the meaning and the use of the word “information”:

The use of the word “information” itself… seems to have exploded since its earliest recorded appearance in 1387. (“Fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankynde.”) As Michael Proffitt, the managing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, notes in an essay written for the recent relaunch of the O.E.D.’s digital edition, “information” is the 486th most frequently occurring word in Project Gutenberg’s searchable corpus of mostly pre-1900 literature. A 1967 survey of contemporary American English ranked it 346th. And the rise of digital technology seems only to have speeded its ascent. One recent survey of online usage lists “information” as the 22nd most common word.

And finally… It seems unlikely that you haven’t seen these already, but still…

New Vintage paperback designs for James M. Cain “conceived by Megan Wilson, executed by Evan Gaffney.” Stunning stuff.

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Published March 14, 2011

Rousseau Deep, Montaigne High

Anthony Gottlieb writes on the renewed interest in 16th Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne for The New York Times:

Like Socrates, Montaigne claims that what he knows best is the fact that he does not know anything much. To undermine common beliefs and attitudes, Montaigne draws on tales of other times and places, on his own observations and on a barrage of arguments in the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition, which encouraged the suspension of judgment as a middle way between dogmatic assertion and equally dogmatic denial. Montaigne does often state his considered view, but rarely without suggesting, explicitly or otherwise, that maybe he is wrong. In this regard, his writing is far removed from that of the most popular bloggers and columnists, who are usually sure that they are right.

And, funnily enough, Sarah Bakewell author of How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer — one of the books mentioned by Gottlieb — recently spoke to Eleanor Wachtel about Montaigne for CBC  Radio’s Writers & Company:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & Co. WITH SARAH BAKEWELL

The cover of the US edition of How To Live, published by Other Press, is by Mr. John Gall (pictured above). But you knew that already of course….

ANTHONY GOTTLIEBAnthony Gottlieb
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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 January 10, 2011

Q & A with John Gall

John Gall is Vice President and Art Director for Vintage/Anchor Books, an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, and the author Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card.

Previously Art Director at Grove/Atlantic, Gall has been interviewed about his work by Step Inside Design, Design Bureau, and Barnes & Noble (video). He garnered even wider attention in 2009 when he commissioned a roster of high-profile designers — including Rodrigo Corral, Carin Goldberg, Chip Kidd, Paul Sahre, Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah —  to redesign twenty-one Vladimir Nabokov book covers within the confines of specimen boxes (read more about the designs at Print Magazine).

I have wanted to interview John for a long time, but as he talked about book design extensively elsewhere and regular readers are more than likely familiar with his work already, I was waiting for the right subject. It was his colleague Peter Mendelsund, who suggested that rather than discuss his book covers, I should ask  John about his collages. John Gall makes collages? Yes, indeed he does. And, needless to say, they are very good.

I met John in Toronto in December last year, and we corresponded by email.

When did you first start making collages?

It’s something that I’ve been doing sporadically since forever. And when I say sporadic I mean, years or decades between doing anything.

Do you create them digitally or by hand?

All hand done. One of the reasons I do this is to get away from the computer, drop the design think and work with the hands. Its kind of liberating to not have the ability to resize things on the fly. I sometimes use a digital camera to keep track of the permutations since my brain no longer can.

Can you give me a sense of their size?

8 x 10 on up to 18 x 24

How do you chose your titles?

The titles come from things I may be thinking about, or reading, or songs I may be listening to at the time I am making them. Then I make an anagram. It now takes me a lot of time to decipher the original source and many times I cannot. Strangely, when I posted “Hot Elves,” I got a ton of hits, which made me briefly consider naming everything after comic-nerd fetishes.

Who are your artistic influences and where do you look for inspiration?

I like the same old dead people as everyone else: Kurt Schwitters, Marianne Brandt, Georges Hugnet, Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain (not dead yet!), etc. People working today who make me incredibly jealous: Fred Free, Mark Lazenby, John Stezaker, James Gallagher, Lou Beach and family, Wangechi Mutu, Clara Mata, Robert Pollard, Nicole Natri, Paul Butler, Charles Wilkin and a bunch of people I’ve met on Flickr who’s real names I do not know.

Not sure how influential any of these folks are but they do inspire me to get off my ass and get to work.

Is creating a collage a similar process to designing a cover?

Yes and no. In both cases you are moving things around on a page until they look “right”. For me, when I am doing the collage work I am eliminating the concept (and most of the time the typography) so it is reduced to forms on a page.

Graphic design is a total left brain/right brain thing. A combination of logical carefully considered thinking and intuitive personal expression. For the collage work I try to put the logical aside and exercise the intuitive muscle.

Has making collages informed your designs?

When I am stuck, I sometimes find myself thinking “What can’t I do on a book cover”? Its chance to make the wrong path and see where that leads. Force myself to make the wrong decisions. Trying to leave thoughts of what looks “good” out of the equation. Nearly impossible, but that is the goal. The hope was that these notebooks could fuel design ideas. Not so sure if that is still the case. They’ve become a thing unto their own.

Have you ever used one of your pieces in a cover?

I used them on a poster once. Attempted to use them on a skateboard design. A couple of people have tried to use them on book covers, to no avail.

Was creating a series of collages from recombined book covers cathartic?

Not really. More like, “hmmm…its 12:30 AM, I’ve spent all day working on book covers and now I’m tearing apart old covers to make new covers. Lo-ser”.

That said I’ve since started up this series again and will be posting them shortly. But I can only do these when I am away from work for a spell. Generally its like, “enough with the book covers already, is Food Jammers on yet?”.

Where do you gather your source materials from?

Most of what I work with comes in the daily mail: catalogs, magazines, etc. I intentionally try not to work with anything that is too vintage or too inherently beautiful—though I do break this rule all the time. My thinking is that all the great collage artists of the past used source material that was lying around in the trash or purchased at the local five and dime. Today we look at a Cornell piece or a Schwitters piece and marvel at the incredible printed material they had to work with. They were working with the Foodtown circulars and Bass Pro Shop catalogs of their day except, well, OK, more beautiful.

Do you still collect Japanese baseball cards?

The collecting has tapered of quite a bit since the book was published. I’m much more selective now. but if I see something particularly beautiful up for auction I’ll probably go for it. I’m not a super smart collector though. I tend to buy what I like and not what will be valuable.

Do you collect anything else?

I’m trying not to acquire to much stuff anymore and am getting ready to purge. I collect old snapshots, the occasional flashlight and I’ve recently acquired a hankering for old high school yearbooks. I’ve also been trading and collecting collage work.

Your collages are included in the recently released Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Great Graphic Designers. How did that come about?

The author Steven Heller, asked me if I had anything that I’d want to contribute. I told him I keep two kinds of notebooks, one that is basically a to do list and idea book. The others are the collage notebooks. They were much more interested in those. By the way, its a beautiful book.

Untitled, James Gall (2008); Untitled, Owen Gall (2008)

You’ve collaborated with your kids on some collages. Can you tell me about ‘Dad’s Drawing Class’?

Kids are the best. The great thing about collage is that anybody can do it, but its hard to do well. Kids are naturals. They have no preconceived notions as to what looks good, just do what they like. So they are free to do whatever they want—that is, until they get old enough to become self conscious..

Dad’s Drawing Class is something I like to do with my kids while we are hanging out on vacation without cellphones and video games. We’ve done collage, some drawing exercises. I even had them drawing typographic forms one morning. My wife is also very creative and influential in this regard. She teaches a nature drawing program for children.

Where can we see your work next?

I had a couple pieces in a group show last year and some of my work will be in a book coming out next spring called “Cutters”. Showing this work is not something that I am actively pursuing. I’m not so convinced of its worthiness. I have a flickr stream, a typepad blog and if you find yourself wandering around in my attic any time soon, you will probably see some work.

Thanks John!

Images:

  1. The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by John Gall
  2. The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah
  3. The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by Rodrigo Corral
  4. Paper Souls, John Gall (2008)
  5. Less Bravos, John Gall (2008)
  6. Shack Wine, John Gall (2010)
  7. Yeast Grippe, John Gall (2009)
  8. Limeade Fans, John Gall (2009)
  9. Cover Combine #13, John Gall (2011)
  10. Cover Combine #8, John Gall (2011)
  11. Cover Combine #4, John Gall (2009)
  12. Amendable Boy, John Gall (2010)
  13. Spray Degree, John Gall (2010)
  14. Untitled, James Gall (2008)
  15. Untitled, Owen Gall (2008)
  16. Gas Diode Zoom, John Gall (2008)
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Published August 4, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The typographical cover for Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s What If Latin America Ruled the World designed by Sarah Greeno at Bloomsbury UK.

The Gall — The inimitable  John Gall, VP and Art Director of Vintage / Anchor Books, interviewed for a rather super looking new magazine called Design Bureau:

[O]nce you have a nice solid concept, the rest of the process can almost seem effortless; enjoyable, even. And these, of course, are usually the best ones.” Gall describes his creative process as threefold: research, concept and execute. “Read the books, come up with some ideas, flesh them out, see what is sticking,” he says. However, it’s the process of getting a book’s cover approved that poses the greatest challenge for Gall and his team. “If the publisher comes back and says, well, ‘This needs really big type with a chicken on it’, that obviously means they think this is kind of important,” he says. “The re-working, dealing with all the feedback (some warranted, some moronic) ‘make this bigger’, ‘make this smaller’, ‘my psychic thinks it should be blue’—that is what separates the men from the boys,” he says.

John Gall by Noah Kalina

The article is accompanied by photographs by Noah Kalina, and includes John’s tips for lunch in New York. What more could you ask for? An interview with designer Abbott Miller you say? Well, Design Bureau have one of those as well.

Exit Interview — Former New York Times Design Director Khoi Vinh on designing the newspaper’s paywall, and his decision to walk away, in the New York Observer:

One way of trying to make logical design decisions is through research. Mr. Vinh’s team has been studying traffic patterns on the site and watching test subjects, real readers, in a lab to see how their eyes move across the page when they are reading The Times online.

“I take it all with a grain of salt,” he said. “Everything is so measurable now, theoretically. But the truth of the matter is, there’s never enough data to substitute for raw decision-making abilities. At the end of the day, you still need to make the decision.”

Designing Madison Avenue — The New York Review of Books blog on the look of TV show Mad Men:

Among many things that make Mad Men so intriguing is its broad definition of what constitutes design. For example, its cunningly detailed, not-quite-couture female costuming—the B.H. Wragge-style coat-and-dress ensembles, the Koret handbags, the Coro costume jewelry—makes the female characters … seem as if they have stepped straight out of the Sunday New York Times during the twilight of Lester Markel… Equally fanatical attention is paid to interior design. The offices of Sterling Cooper were done up in the spacious, late International Style corporate mode epitomized by the boxy glass-and-steel skyscrapers that rose along Park Avenue after World War II.

And on a somwhat related note, Eleanor Wachtel interviews legendary designer Milton Glaser for CBC Radio. Good stuff.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

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Published July 19, 2010

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Jamie Keenan’s inspired cover for The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, published by Vintage:

Image courtesy of Vintage and Anchor Books Art Director John Gall.

(Via @Pieratt and Book Cover Archive)

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Published March 31, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

A bit late in the day on this beautiful cover for The Book of Fathers by Miklós Vámos… The collage is by Swedish artist Nicole Natri. The design is by John Gall. Lovely stuff.

And on the subject of book design, I recently stumbled on The Jacket Museum an AMAZING book cover blog curated by Ferran Lopez, a book designer at Random House Mondadori in Spain. With this and The Covered Up Blog now up and running,  I might as well pack up my bags and go home…

Comrade Stalin Calling — Will Self on playwright and author Mikhail Bulgakov in The Guardian:

On 18 April 1930, Mikhail Bulgakov ate his lunch in his Moscow flat and then lay down for his customary nap. However, he was soon roused by the telephone ringing, and shortly after that his second wife, Lyuba, came in to tell him that someone from the Central Committee (of the Communist party) wished to speak to him. Bulgakov assumed it was a malicious trick of some kind – such things were common at that time, a grimly antic precursor of the persecutions to come – but when he picked up the handset he heard a voice say, “Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov?” and, when he affirmed this, “Comrade Stalin will talk to you now”.

Bulgakov’s novels The Heart of a Dog and (of course) The Master and the Margarita are wonderful. His play The White Guard is currently being performed at the National Theatre in London.

Metadata is Marketing — Craig Riggs on why publishers need to improve their metadata:

[W]e’re… discovering books in very new ways. For one thing, our filters are shifting. Newspaper review sections are shrinking, and there are fewer independent bookstores hand-selling books. But it’s the Internet that is really moving the needle on book discovery: the Web is where we go to find out about things, and increasingly it’s where we go to find books… This is more than a change in behaviour. It also marks a sea change in book marketing. It used to be that the press release or catalogue was the foundation of the marketing plan. No more. Now it’s the metadata: the title information that publishers send out into the world about their books.

And finally…

The Cult of Busy — Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation and Confessions of a Public Speaker, on time management:

I choose not to say Yes to everything. For to do so would make me too busy, and I think, less effective at what my goals are.  I always want to have some margin of my time in reserve, time I’m free to spend in any way I choose, including doing almost nothing at all. I’m free to take detours. I’m open to serendipity. Some of the best thinkers throughout history had some of their best thoughts while  going for walks, playing cards with friends, little things things that generally would not be considered the hallmarks of busy people. It’s the ability to pause, to reflect, and relax, to let the mind wander, that’s perhaps the true sign of time mastery, for when the mind returns it’s often sharper and more efficient, but most important perhaps, happier than it was before.

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Published March 24, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

A new cover from John Gall, seen at Peter Mendelsund’s JACKET MECHANICAL. Am I the only one who wants to hear these two in conversation? Dear NPR, could you get on that please?

Soft in the Middle — James Surowiecki looks at how midrange companies are being pressured by both high-end products at one end and ‘just good enough’ products at the other in the New Yorker (via Kottke):

The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting tighter every day… This doesn’t mean that companies are going to abandon the idea of being all things to all people. If you’re already in the middle of the market, it’s hard to shift focus—as G.M. has discovered. And the allure of a big market share is often hard to resist, even if it doesn’t translate into profits.

I think we going to see this more in publishing with the midlist losing out to quick, cheap and ‘just good enough’ e-books and expensive, beautifully packaged hardcovers.

Somewhere Between Skeptic and Proselytizer — John Williams founder of The Second Pass interviewed at The Virginia Quarterly Review blog:

I think the way books are written about has been opened up in healthy ways. I like that there are more amateur (and semi-pro and pro) voices on the Internet, in the sense that it’s not just the unimaginative circle wherein writers of a certain kind of book review another example of that kind of book written by someone else. I’m not the first (or even the hundredth) to think that can lead to a lot of back-scratching or dry summation rather than forcefully argued opinion. It’s also true that the Internet has been great for, say, literature in translation, where entire sites (like Three Percent) can be devoted to a subject that gets less attention than it should in mainstream outlets. But as for how literary careers are made, I don’t think that’s changed as much as the tech apostles would like to believe.

The Incredible Book-Making Boy — Super talented author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, whose new book The Heart and the Bottle was published earlier this month, interviewed at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

I begin with a single idea… and then tease that out in my sketchbook with hundreds of other drawings and pieces of writing that explore how the narrative can grow and extend into something that is satisfying. Once I’ve got a basic plot, I work with my editor in streamlining everything down to fit the thirty-two-page format…  Getting the story to flow between those thirty-two pages is probably the most difficult part. It’s like directing a film, where the pace needs to be set and decisions made of what goes where. It’s at this point that many of the compositions get cut. There is a careful balance between what the pictures are showing and what the words are saying, and if something is shown, it often doesn’t need to be said.

And finally…

Contemporaries, He Yanming

Chinese Book Covers seen at the excellent Ephemera Assemblyman.

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Published December 16, 2009

Midweek Miscellany

Eye, Eye! — The Creative Review looks at the vibrant work of printing studio/small press Nobrow.

It’s an Anagram! — Indigo’s e-book initiative Shortcovers has become ‘Kobo’. Much fuss has been made about the name (and the slightly iffy redesign), but what’s more interesting is that Kobo is being spun-off from its parent company in an attempt to expand its global reach… The intrepid Mark Bertils and PW have more on the international angle; Wired think Amazon should be worried; and The National Post have a good Q&A with Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis…

Collector’s Items — Vote for your favourite Nabokov cover from John Gall‘s set of individually commissioned redesigns for Vintage.

The Decade of Dirty Design — Steven Heller, author of Handwritten and New Vintage Type (to name just a couple) on the “anti-digital” Oughts (via Charles Brock):

With the increase of the D.I.Y. sensibility, with renewed emphasis on “making things from scratch,” designers were feeling a need to make physical (not virtual) contact with their materials and outcomes…

[Perhaps less “anti-digital” than “post-digital“? Any thoughts designers?]

And finally…

ryan-tym

The Hitchcock Collection — a self-initiated project by London-based graphic designer Ryan Tym (via FormFiftyFive):

After recently purchasing a badly designed Alfred Hitchcock
DVD box set, I set to work on creating my own collection of
original covers. Each design features an iconic image related
to the film it represents and includes a bold typographic
title.

I would love to see Ryan design some book covers… Wouldn’t you?

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