Happy October 1st

Eve Siegel again. It's a cold fall day here in southern New England. So, a couple of warm-colored covers whose titles are appropriate to the season.

Designer: Amy Rose Grigoriou

Designer: Edel Rodriguez

Does anyone know of other covers that could be included?

Designing Women

Eve Siegel again, filling in for Joe. I had the privilege, while at Oxford University Press, to work with two art directors whose cover designs were a constant source of inspiration to me. Cathleen Elliott, and Kathleen Lynch, have both gone on to open their own businesses.

I miss looking over their shoulders in the office, and asked them to send me a few of their most recent designs. I got an interesting result: 10 covers with images of women on them!

So, here's a virtual "looking over their shoulders" to see what they've been up to lately.

Cathleen Elliott (who has branched out into young adult and historical women's fiction):

and Kathleen Lynch (the third item is four covers together—a 4-volume series, with original illustration by Carole Henaff):

The Blogger's Kit

Austin here. There were some very good comments on Saturday's post about Asterios Polyp and the need for 3-D views of book cover designs.

In one of the comments, I mentioned that publishing companies and authors should provide a "Blogger's Kit" for each of their books. Everybody's heard of press kits, but the aim of a Blogger's Kit is spreadability--images and videos that are easy to embed, post, disseminate on the web.

The best place I can see this happening isn't on a publisher's website, but on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Flickr, unlike a publisher's website, is a destination--a place where people hang out, favorite photos and comment. People love Flickr. They go there for inspiration. Publishers should go there to meet them.

Using Flickr is easy. You can organize your photos into collections and sets. Each photo page contains an embed code, making blogging a snap. To top it off, Flickr also allows for 90-second videos. (For an example, see Fantagraphics' account.)

A pro Flickr account costs $25 a year, but a free account should suffice for most authors. Digital cameras and camcorders are cheaper than ever.

Here's what I think a Blogger's Kit on Flickr should include:

• author photos
• the book cover (front and back)
• "3-D" shots of the book in space
• excerpt shots of the book spreads
• a video of someone flipping through the book
  

Each photo or video is easily labeled, so you can put all the pertinent information: bio, plot summary, design/editorial credits, and links for purchase.

The first pass of my book isn't quite finished yet, but I've already set up a Blogger's kit for author photos, free high-resolution scans of my newspaper blackout poems suitable for print, and other press clippings. This has helped me out tremendously when I need to provide a quick resource for bloggers and journalists.

I'd love to see other authors and publishers do the same.

What do y'all think of this idea? Anything missing from The Kit?

Type Only

I'm Eve Siegel, filling in for Joe. I've been wondering how other book cover designers approach the assignment of "type only" cover design. Here are three that are probably known to all of you. I love the fact that all three convey a strong concept using only type, or type and color. And maybe that's always the answer—concept first, and it doesn't necessarily matter if you have a photo or illustration.

Designer: gray318

Designer: Jennifer Carrow

Designer: Peter Mendelsund

If all else fails, I could try these folks, and get the type in mustard, chocolate, leaves, or any number of materials.

What's your approach to this kind of assignment?

Asterios Polyp

Design by David Mazzucchelli

Austin Kleon here, filling in for Joe.

Asterios Polyp is a gorgeous book, and one of my favorites of the year. Unfortunately, you'd never know how good-looking it is from just looking at a scan of the cover on Amazon:

Contrast that image with a few snapshots I took of the book on my coffee table:

The 2-D image is just so-so, but when you see the book in 3-D, the design makes perfect sense: the way the dust jacket plays off the muted book boards, and the strip of yellow on the spine around the author's name that perfectly balances the whole thing...

(When it comes to JPEG injustice, another cartoonist's work comes to mind: Jordan Crane's design for Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends.)

A few smart publishers online don't settle for mere images when it comes to showing off their book designs. The comics publisher Fantagraphics often posts videos on their Flickr stream of someone flipping through their new releases. (Examples: Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, Tony Millionaire's Drinky Crow's Maakies Treasury.) In the age of YouTube, iPhone video, and cheap Flip camcorders, I'm surprised this isn't done more often.

What are some of your favorite book cover designs that aren't done justice in 2-D?

Something to Tell You, Danish edition

Design by Poul Lange

Just a quick post before I turn this over for a week to some guest bloggers. Be sure to stop by to see what they do; I know I will!

Earlier in the week I posted three editions of Hanif Kureishi's Something to Tell You. This afternoon, designer Poul Lange sent in the cover for the Danish edition. About the design, he wrote: "Since the book centers around a psychotherapist and the frantic swinger's scene in London, I thought I could bring those two elements together by creating a Rorschach Inkblot test out of pornographic images...suprisingly, the cover was immediately approved by the Danish editor." The Faber UK edition plays up the sex aspect of the story as well, but not quite like this...

Click here for a larger version.

PS: This made me think of Keenan's design for Joe Meno's The Great Perhaps. And that's a good thing :-)

Five for Friday, 9.25.09

Homo Zapiens; design by Darren Haggar:


Long Past Stopping; design by Mary Schuck, photograph by Jennifer Kennard:


The Wildfire Season; design by The Heads of State:



The Gastronomy of Marriage; design by Anna Bauer, photograph by Mark Weiss:


Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell; design by Holly Macdonald:

Impossible Motherhood

Design by Carin Goldberg

You might have heard of this book; if you haven't, you will. It remains to be seen if there's a more polarizing book published this fall season. If you're not familiar with it, read the description on the publisher's Web site.


Earlier this week, I twittered the following:


A number of my Twitter followers replied, and all of them encouraged me to post this for discussion. One noted that "design is about message, and this is a very excellent example of committing to a visual messsage using the most simple tools." I couldn't agree more. But what really stuck in my head was something someone else offered: "That's brave, expressively strong, yet quiet." It was the adjective "quiet" that stuck in my head as this design's most important attribute, probably because reaction to the book has been and will be anything but.

I wanted to know more, so I asked designer Carin Goldberg a few questions, and she was gracious enough to reply:

The BDR: Did you consciously design this with a sense of quiet or calm in mind? So much about it *is* quiet, even delicate: the colors, the weight of the female form, the type. Is your design solution a conscious effort to suggest "really...please give this book a chance?"

Carin Goldberg: Yes, the subject matter of this book is very sensitive and potentially controversial. And yes, of course it was important to design a cover that wouldn’t frighten the audience or misrepresent the author and her complex story. The design was not meant to provoke in an overt or gratuitous way.

The BDR: The tally marks are small and thin, but less quiet, and suggestive of more than just simply keeping count, espcially as they're placed on the body. Did you hesitate using the red tally marks as a design element?

Carin Goldberg: No, I never hesitated. They marks were my first idea. And yes, they are meant to have a double meaning, or maybe even a triple meaning. Not only do they tally the number of the abortions she has had and suggest a woman’s pubic area, but they might also be seen as prisoner tallies. The author was imprisoned by her psyche and by her compulsion to have multiple abortions.

I think Carin hit the nail on the head by stressing the need not to misrepresent the author and her story. In following that simple-to-understand but not always simple-to-produce idea, she's designed an amazingly effective and resonating cover.

What do you think?

Something to Tell You

Because I won't be blogging next week -- others will -- I've been cleaning house, reviewing a bunch of half-written posts that had been languishing in draft mode.

I had intended to publish Rex Bonomelli's design for Something to Tell You (top) after featuring the Faber & Faber UK edition (middle; original post here), but I never did. Jennifer Heuer's design for the forthcoming US paperback (bottom) is a good enough reason to post all three.

PS: Check out Faceout Book's interview w/ Rex.

Designated Drivers @ the BDR Next Week

The Book Design Review will have guest bloggers from September 26 to October 3. I'm handing the keys to:

Austin Kleon: Austin is a writer, cartoonist, and designer living in Austin, Texas. A collection of his newspaper blackout poems, Newspaper Blackout, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in April 2010.

Eve Siegel: Eve is a freelance book cover/interior designer in Ridgefield, CT who does work for Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill, and Lippincott.

Eve's expressed an interest in starting a discussion about purely typographic cover designs, but other than that, I don't know what they'll be blogging about.

This should be fun.