I didn't know this: before his infamous 1960 shoe-banging incident, Nikita Khrushchev toured the U.S. "and captivated the world with his comic, belligerent, threatening, childish, and just-plain-offbeat antics...meeting Hollywood icons, eating hot dogs, mugging for the press, arguing with President Eisenhower, (and) making fun of Vice President Nixon..." (Booklist). Lurking behind the shenanigans was the very real threat of nuclear annihilation, which makes me appreciate the collage all the more. I see an explosive cloud. Do you?
The (forthcoming) publication of two books from William T. Vollman presents a pretty cool opportunity to see basic design elements used in different ways and to different effect. On top is the cover for Vollman's 1,344(!) page "encyclopedic gathering of facts, stories, impressions, and analysis about the volatile and tragic U.S.-Mexico borderland" (Booklist); below is the cover for his companion volume of photographs taken in Imperial County, California.
Recent graphic design program graduate (and Jane Austen fan) Leigh-Anne Mullock designed these for a student project: "I used hand-embroidered illustrations which feature imagery about their relationships that the novel's protagonists might have stitched." And by "used hand-embroidered illustrations," she means she actually embroidered these illustrations.
The MIT Press has reissued Michel Sanouillet's seminal Dada in Paris. Before you say this isn't Dada enough for you, read the National Gallery of Art's description of Dadaist typography: "Dadaists delighted in uncoventional typographic design, frequently mixing fonts employing unorthodox punctuation, printing both horizontally and vetically on a single sheet, and sprinkling texts with randomly chosen printers' symbols." I call this close enough and pretty delightful.
This could have gone the way of an ascent of man illustration, and it would have been the poorer for it. But it's the asymmetry that really makes this work. The placement of the illustration is a nice antidote to the centered, stacked type, and pushing the cart off the edge of the photo creates movement and suggests, well, evolution.
A pretty awesome example of editorial driving design. There's just no way we'd see "Curiousity" alone on the front of this, without subtitle and author name, if that was the name of the book. Using a question as the title opens the door for a much more playful design solution.
Hardcover designed by Jennifer Carrow Paperback designed by Alexander Knowlton
Author and poet Sarah Manguso's memoir documents her battle with CIPD, which attacks the myelin sheath of the peripheral nerves.
Both designs are pretty wonderful (hardcover is first, paperback after that), and they give me another opportunity to quote John Gall on the difference in designing hardcovers and trade paperbacks. It's worth repeating:
"There is definitely more freedom in hardcover design. Hardcover sales are generally review driven, so the cover doesn’t have to come on as strong and, I think, less people buy them on impulse because of their price. They’ll read a review and look for the book. The paperback does not have the fortune of being timed to the review attention, so the cover—we’re talking front list here—has to say something like “Remember me? You were waiting for me to come out in paperback? Remember? I’m the one the New York Times really liked, you know, the one about the guy with narcolepsy who likes the girl in the plaid skirt. …”
This design is as sharp and focused as the laser sight dot on Hitler's head. Anachronistic? I don't care. Brilliant. UPDATE: Designer Jason Booher wrote in to say the dot is "not literally anything; just an abstraction of the idea of killing him."
A book that spins Frankenstein so far off its axis (Mary Shelley didn't invent the monster, but meets him when she's a young girl and after he's been abandoned by Viktor; this is the monster's account of his and Shelley's lives) demands a no-neck-bolts-and-green-skin approach, and Mendelsund nails it. We don't lose the grotesqueness of the creation, and we're reminded of the humanness of it all.
I've previously featured a small handful of covers from Seven Hundred Penguins (see them here), one of the greatest "sit on the back deck and have a beer or two as you thumb through a book" books I've ever owned. It's full of covers that would never see the light of day now, but few are better than this. No green salad and exercise regimen here; we see the problem, and not the solution. Could you get away with this in 2009?
While you're thinking that over, can you answer a quick question?
