kisscut book design

The Gender and Health branch of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research brought together some new research and approached me for the packaging of 12 cases. One of the cases discusses the idea of a “gender lens” that prevents industry professionals from seeing issues clearly as they pertain to males and females . . . which turned into the most challenging photo shoot I have ever attempted. I purchased several convex and concave lenses from a high school science supply store and experimented with placing the lenses over the title in different ways:

And, because it’s a government publication, I had to do it all over again in french, of course.

The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators — family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself — her family’s dark past, and the core of her mother’s despair, are slowly revealed.

Rebee and her mother usually escape their problems at night, ricocheting around rural Alberta in a busted white van, setting off my first cover idea:

The second concept I presented was derived from the preliminary title “The Shore Girl Clippings” which refers to the nail trimmings that Rebee saves in a jar and carries around from place to place. She also has a slightly mangled hand from when her mother refused treatment for a broken finger. These character traits were just begging for a collage of some sort:

This project came with a title pun of sorts and a too-good-to-be-true brief: “just do some kind of bold, colourful, perhaps Art Deco-style all-text cover.” I went straight to the typeface Bifur, originally designed by Cassandre in 1929 and recreated by P22 in the 90s. The ‘Y’ letterform already looks a bit like a martini glass, it only needed minor adjustments.

About the plays: Absurdity reigns in multiple award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini’s newest collection of work: five plays spanning two decades, from 1989 to 2009. A lonely elephant handler befriends the half-blind woman who drove through his yard, a severed head in a suitcase life support system is given a second chance at life, a quiet shut-in wrestles with the jealous ghost of his wife, a young woman with the ability to smell lies struggles to make new friends, and a mismatched pod of whales in the Pacific Ocean struggle with identity, love, and interspecies dating. With a sharp tongue and impeccable comedic timing, Martini’s characters resonate beyond their impossible situations, their fears and hesitations all too human.

The other concept I was asked to mock up is a whale swimming inside a martini glass. I gave it a go, I really did, but it somehow evolved into a martini-fuelled photo shoot using the glass I was drinking from to obscure the title:

Theanna Bischoff’s new novel pieces together the childhood memories of Darcy Nolan and the moments leading up to and following her nineteen-year-old sister’s suicide. Each section of the book begins with a verse of the rhyme, There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, which influenced the cover imagery:

This jacket is the culmination of an afternoon of good food and good company with author Ian Williams, editor Robyn Read, and Freehand forewoman Sarah Ivany. Somewhere between the marinated olives and the sandwiches, we decided to play off the title and compose a cover of personal ads written by Ian. And instead of the usual back cover book description, we would showcase a series of lines describing Readers Seeking Poems and Poems Seeking Readers – specific poems from the collection looking for an audience, such as: “Office Suite seeks reader skilled in MS applications & dead-end relationships.”

Click the thumbnail for a closer view and to read more of the classifieds:

The typeface is a “Didone” revival called Eloquent, created by Jukebox Type. It has an over-the-top romantic flare that’s perfect for Ian’s “almost-love poems.” The book is full of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with each other, often to no avail.

There are some neat things inside, too:

“. . . aspirations to perfection awaken us to our actual imperfection.”
– Patrick Grant

The client provided this loaded excerpt as a brief and it gave me lots to think about:

“As Bruce Bartlett (advisor to Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush) told New York Times reporter Ron Suskind: ‘This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they are extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them because he is just like them.’ One of the best books on the recent Northern Ireland conflict is Richard Davis’s Mirror Hate (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994), and, among other things, it can help to clarify some implications of Bartlett’s remark. In this elegant and telling analysis Davis shows that although Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries are enemies, they also mirror one another. The enmity in itself is not difficult to describe because it is plainly declared by the opposed factions and their propagandists. But a further process of ‘unconscious convergence,’ whereby the opposed factions come to resemble one another, is more difficult to discern. That is, if we hate with sufficient intensity, we unwittingly become like our enemy, mirroring our enemy’s strategies and our enemy’s thinking. And in this ’symbiotic antagonism,’ says Davis, the simplifications of propaganda readily triumph over ‘humanity and common sense.’ ”

Cover photo by Lauri Rotko.

I was asked to do the impossible: create an image that blends the author’s Cree/Ojibwe/Scottish/English heritage. Naomi McIlwraith’s new collection of poetry is written in both English and Plains Cree, and focuses on the concern of language loss.

Below is my preliminary pencil crayon sketch for the title block. Root imagery not only pops up often in the text, but is a fitting way to represent McIlwraith’s intricate lineage. Her work talks about language being rooted in the land, the multiple definitions of Seneca root, and the structure/roots of words.

I made a fossil.

I put the skills I acquired in Art School 101 to use, finally. My counterfeit artifact was intended for Alex Leslie’s first collection of short stories, to be released by Freehand Books in a few weeks.

After carving out the negative space around the title block (the backwards title block) into a piece of lino, I pressed it into a slab of clay to create a fossil-like impression. Then, my petrified art piece was rejected, and my prowess as a sculptor questioned.

I may or may not have thrown it off my balcony after receiving the bad news.

The final cover is a more elegant and haunting solution for Leslie’s West Coast themed lit.

I recently traveled to Toronto to network heckle Chip Kidd and frequent the Umbra store. Somewhere between this and this, I convinced ECW Press to give me a shot at a book cover.

Next thing I know, a brief arrives in my inbox and the author, Jamie Sharpe, is listing Julie Morstad as inspiration for imagery. Her aesthetic oozes the same anachronistic yet slightly sinister feel as the book. I quickly realize the bar is set high and start to panic.

The following Saturday night, after a few inadequate mockups involving aprons (“husbandry”) and antlers (“animal”) have materialized, I’m out socializing drinking scotch on a pal’s living room floor and I realize there’s a framed print hanging on her wall that seems to have been crafted specifically for one of the poems in the collection. So I deciphered a few initials in the illegible signature and set out to stalk the recent ACAD grad who made it.

Just short of Facebooking a total stranger and/or going to the mall to surprise him at his part-time retail job, I found Reagan Cole McLean.

Here is the aforementioned stanza, from the poem entitled The Dundreary-Arts:

“What is the parable of the whale?  He floats wall-less,
Without history, secure in his girth like a slumbering god.
Awake: for we have a silver dollar with your name.”

This is the second runner-up, using artwork from the interior. I was drawn to the graphic nature of the piece and the obscure assortment of imagery: a dead bird, a hammer, a timepiece, a torso, and a screaming mouth. Good mix.

While The Sun Is Above Us takes readers deep into Sudan through the intertwined narratives of two women. In the midst of a bloody civil war, Adut is brutally captured and held as a slave for eight years. Sandra, fleeing her life in Canada, travels to South Sudan as an aid worker but soon finds herself unwittingly embroiled in a violent local conflict.

For the cover, I had the privilege of purchasing a photograph from Françoise Lacroix’s portfolio at Panoptika.