Book designer: covers, interiors, more.
Just finished this series of Michael Collins novels for Open Road Media. They’re eBook covers, but I pretended that I was working with spot metallic pantones for the top bands. This is my third series for the client, and I love how I’m forced to push myself to play with new type and colours. Finding just the right detective story tropes was a ball, too. How could I not have fun with titles like Shadow of the Tiger, The Brass Rainbow and Night of the Toads?
The Lolita Cover Project, curated by John Bertram, is a fascinating exercise. Dozens of stellar book designers have been approached for their takes on this important 20th century novel. I’m thrilled to be in such good company (see the link for the list of participating designers!)
I thought the image of a cage was fitting, in that Lolita has become trapped in her relationship with Humbert Humbert, but he is equally trapped by his attraction to, as he calls them, nymphets (hence the white cage, to represent their perceived innocence). The bird is ambiguously both inside and outside the cage. The images are from one of my favourite resources for mocking up illustrated covers, vectorstock.com.
I got an email last week from Thomas Allen publishers happily letting me know that three of the books I’d designed covers for have been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize — Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party, Caroline Adderson’s The Sky is Falling, and Jack Hodgins’ The Master of Happy Endings. Kind of crazy to have three out of the twelve books shortlisted for Canada sport covers by yours truly!
Sara Selecky’s Cake was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize last year (thank goodness I didn’t have to figure out where to put the sticker proclaiming the shortlisting, since I’d probably still be trying to figure out the ‘best’ place for it on the cover). Fishtailing, by Wendy Phillips (my first YA cover), won a Governor General’s Literary award –and fortunately I didn’t have to figure out that sticker, either!.
And while, of course, the nominations have nothing to do with the covers, there’s still a nice warm feeling knowing I participated in the creation of the printed books for these fine authors. Congratulations to all of them!
Designer and Typographer Jessica Hische created The Internet Sends Me Cake as a fun quid pro quo — people send her cake, she links to their site. Author Sarah Selecky recently sent in a copy of her collection of short stories This Cake Is for the Party. Jessica’s assessment of the book: “…beautifully designed”.
It’s been years I’ve read an issue of Wired cover to cover, but with the release of the iPad app, the time had come to revisit an old favourite. From the point of view of a print designer, with years of magazine experience under my belt, what a pleasure it was to explore this new magazine format. Whereas the Popular Science iPad app certainly looked the part of ‘magazine of the future’, I found it cumbersome to navigate, and I lost interest quickly. Wired’s app sits in a sweet spot between traditional print magazine and multimedia experience — with goodies like 360º images that are rotated based on user input, integrated video, and well-placed audio, it all feels… right.
After telling myself month after month that I needed to go to New York, and say hello to a few art directors, last week I finally made it. I just couldn’t pass up the AIGA Small Talk presented by UK designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan, and the opportunity to mix and mingle a bit with a bunch of talented book designers afterwards.
Last year before closing shop at Black Eye Design and going solo, we put together a self-promo that I am still proud of. The idea came to me while making some homemade Play Doh for my then three year old son: wouldn’t cyan, magenta, yellow and black Play Clay be a fun giveaway for fellow art directors and designers. Something to goof around with and have some fun. We’d send out sets to colleagues and see what they put together.
These are rejected concepts for an honest account of a father’s relationship with his autistic son. The first image is of my stepson: in the book, the son is described as being remarkably engaged for an autistic boy. I wanted to show the two sides of the boy — attentive and engaged, as well as distant and in his own world.
The second concept plays on a passage from the book where the boy describes himself as a monkey to the father’s elephant. I thought those animals served as excellent symbols for the father and son.
It’s back to the drawing board with these, but I felt like I got two solid ideas out, so that’s always satisfying in and of itself.
Around this time last year, I made the decision to make a go of being a full time book designer. I had been running a boutique graphic design studio for ten years, and it was time to do something different. I shuttered the studio, set up a home office, and concentrated on doing what I enjoy doing the most: designing for the printed page, specifically for book covers.
