x

On the scanner bed: one tangled net + a photo of blue sky + the long and unpronounceable name of a municipality in South America.
(click for more detail of the jacket)

For those of you who are astute, it is indeed a fish net, not a butterfly net. But the story is about capturing human beings, not insects, so it could potentially work.

(book description here)

The origin of this synonymic series of posts.
(And, no, I’m not confident I should be using the word “synonymic” like that.)

I am running out of interesting ways to put paintings on book covers.

I usually try to talk the publisher out of it. The original artwork is produced at a specific scale and isn’t meant to be experienced as a thumbnail. There are usually strict rules set in place by the museum or artist that prohibit cropping, bleeding, or adding type, which severely dampens creative freedom. The proportions rarely fill a 6 x 9 cover, so the designer is forced to set it against a bland flood of colour. The texture of the paint, brushstrokes, and canvas is lost. Modern digital printing technology can’t replicate the colour properly. (Just to name a few reasons…)

My first time tackling an art cover demanded several mock-ups until I found a way to use the prominent art piece in a dynamic but still respectful way.

My next attempt was for Dreamwork, Jonathan Locke Hart’s latest book of poetry. To make things even more challenging, the watercolour on the table was painted by the author’s mother. (No talking anybody out of that one.) Fortunately Hart values graphic design and art equally, so I proposed some alternative ways to display the piece:

But how many times have you seen a picture frame or a page turn on a book cover?

So I took an abstract approach instead by magnifying an area of the landscape with great light, and printed the jacket on a textured paper that mimicks the surface of canvas and augments the stippled brush work:

The full painting was revealed following the last poem in the book:

(American artist Titus Kaphar might be heading in the right direction by obscuring and shredding the paintings…)

Because a blog, website, facebook account, and twitter apparently don’t provide enough outlets for social media and self promotion: you can now find me on D:R too.

Sometimes it’s nice to rescue a rejected cover idea by using it for the back of the jacket or interior design somehow. For this title I initially proposed to show an inventory of LEGO pieces isometric-projection-style on the cover. I did this on the back instead, creating a nice before and after relationship with the already-constructed robot on the front (click for detail):

Spot gloss over the red lines and text:

Listening to Trees is now happily contributing to faceout books!
Read the interview here.

“Even if I were responsible for pumping millions of gallons of oil into the ocean and wanted desperately to avoid any guilty feelings for my acts… I would still pick this cover up…”
— Jason Gabbert
(art director and facial hair enthusiast at faceout studio in Oregon)

Don’t ask how, but I convinced the amazing Dan Estabrook to let me use one of his pieces on the cover of Myrna Dey’s first novel. Dan is based out of Brooklyn and exhibits in real cities like New York, Chicago and… Atlanta. He uses nineteenth-century photographic techniques to make contemporary art, working with hand-altered calotypes and salt prints. The piece I’ve absconded with is a mounted toned silver print called “Untitled Twins, 1992″.

Extensions tells the story of a woman who is uncovering information about her ancestors, and the impact that these bits of lost history have on her life. She makes the chance discovery of a sepia photograph of her grandmother and twin sister, in the hands of a stranger. So she decides to find out how a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC ended up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost 100 years later.

This artwork resonates perfectly with Myrna’s words, from the scissors right down to the teardrop stains on the green matte board:

I was originally hoping to employ an image by local photographer Eleanor Lazare, from her series My Aunt Molly’s Shoes. She projected old photos of her mother and grandmother on the wall, and then took a photo of herself standing in front of the screen. The construction of the series compliments the concept of the book perfectly by showing three generations of women and — quite literally — a reflection of the past onto the present:

Both artists are using historic photos in a contemporary way. Unfortunately, Eleanor’s images don’t accurately represent the genre. They suggest memoir or non-fiction by fixing the people in photos as characters in the book. The author requested that readers be free to invent their own visions of the characters. (I’m hoping to find a better literary fit for Eleanor’s work because I’m just in love with the series.)

I decided to post this as a response to the many skeptical looks I’ve received after stating that I design books for a living.

BEFORE:

This is what a book looks like pre-design. Basically, a massive pile of paper containing:
- Multiple versions of the manuscript typed up by the author in Microsoft word
- An editorial “road map” designating what might go where
- Lists with spelling, grammar, and stylistic corrections that need to be inserted from 3 or 4 rounds of editing
- Loose drawings torn from sketchbooks
- A reference guide labeling illustrations (in this case, 240 of them)
- Handwritten notes from all involved on $30 worth of post-its

AFTER:

This is what it looks like post-design and printing.

I designed a 6 x 10″ horizontal landscape format with 5″ wide jacket flaps that hold the author portrait drawings and bios. Olivier Martini is on the front flap and Clem Martini on the back:

The interior layout follows a 3-column grid system, running the illustrations on the verso pages and the text on the recto pages:

I broke this rule occasionally to strengthen the dialogue between Clem and Olivier, when one brother’s story needed to take the spotlight:

Over the years, the various treatments Olivier experimented with affected his composure and the steadiness of his hands. So his mark-making changes throughout the book, reflecting side effects of medication like Stelazine:

Added visual details augment the reader’s experience with the content of the book:

Apparently, between 1908 and 2009, daycare has been a point of contention in this province.

This is my preliminary solution for the cover of Langford’s exposé. The grainy illustration was pilfered from a child care manual circa 1986. I’m pushing for the upside down orientation, but it will take some cajoling.

The formidable Marvin Harder will be designing the interior.

(I told myself I wouldn’t indulge in white book covers anymore. They blend into the background on-screen. When the books are shipped from the plant, the plain white stock is always a disappointment. In this case, the stark contrast of the source drawing is responsible for my relapse. The black on white gives it that “low resolution output device on low grade paper” feel that suites the bureaucratic topic.)

For the third book in Roy Innes’ mystery series, I etched the cover image and title into an inked board using various pointy objects:

The interior chapter numbers are also carved by hand, based on FF Quadraat by Fred Smeijers.

I designed the last installment in 2007 using the same illustration technique. The setting is important in both books, so I found a way to describe two contrasting environments in a similar visual rhetoric: Downtown Vancouver and the cattle ranching district of West Caribou, British Columbia.