Books from Argentina

The BDR takes a tour down south -- way south -- with these covers from Argentinian designer Juan Pablo Cambariere. Like Matt Dawson before him, Juan Pablo was nice enough to explain the thinking behind these covers and some of the details of the design process. Thanks, Juan Pablo!

Gold from Moscu (El oro de moscu)




Gold from Moscu (El oro de moscu) discloses the connection between the Argentinean Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s government, which was thought to financially support this party with huge amounts of money. It´s full of Cold War-style mystery and myths about this relationship, its methods and its consequences.

The editor’s first suggestion was to use a picture of a golden ingot. I thought that a simulation of a package as book cover was more appropriate, and we arrived at the idea of a worn-out package, the interior of which is unknown (in order to apply the old idea that says that ignorance is the origin of all fears).

So I built a package with all its real elements, in order to create the correct atmosphere. I made a real package with craft paper, tied it with a cord and put a few stamps on it, and then photographed it. Most of the time the front and back cover information is modified just a couple of hours before taking it to the printer company, so I had no other choice than to leave some empty spaces, so that I could simulate the stamps in Photoshop. I pity I wasn´t able to stamp all of the words as well, for that would have worked out better for sure.

Another positive aspect is that the book itself is pretty thick (550 pages), so this makes it look like a real package.

Lived lives (Vida de vivos)



Lived lives (Vida de vivos) is a collection of interviews of a colourful and heterogeneous group of local celebrities by one of our most distinguished journalists.

Although I applied the same idea and resources that I used in Gold from Moscu, this cover turned out much easier. If you ever visit a newspaper’s headquarters, you will see that most of the journalists have their desktop drawers full of old tapes with old interviews, a lot of them unlabeled. I thought one of these tapes was a perfect representation of this book: the old, raw, uncensored, unedited interview lost in the back of a drawer. I just had to take a simple picture of it and try not to ruin it with the text, so what I did was to simulate a sticker/label using varnish. This sticker continues across the spine and to the back of the book.