Kit Mills on Book Designs

Hello and welcome to the first installment of Judge a Book by its Cover, our brand-new and very shiny design-centric column. First, I’d like to talk about the process behind the jacket design of Claire Hollander’s newly-published novel, Something Right Behind Her. After a read-through, I had a pretty clear idea of the aesthetic I wanted to use for the cover. It’s a young adult novel, but it’s about death and having unfulfilling sex and not wanting to deal with emotions–there’s nothing cute about it, this is a dark book. At times it has an ominous and ghostly feel to it, and I wanted to incorporate that in the cover designs. We played with a few images to use as the focus, but settled on a shot from the book’s trailer. Some manipulation in Photoshop rendered it indistinct and textured, to reflect the uncertainty that the protagonist experiences throughout the novel. And then… fonts. When you’ve been evaluating the shapes of letters for hours upon hours they really do lose all meaning. Eventually I went with Didot (italic, all-caps) for the title because of its understated elegance. I paired Gotham Book, beautiful in its simplicity and versatility, with the author’s name, and the review blurb is in Gotham Light. The excerpt on the back cover is Linux Linotype, the font in which I meant to typeset the whole novel. Unfortunately, that idea was thwarted by Kindle’s make-it-look-as-boring-as-possible publishing guidelines, but at least the cover remains as intended. How does the emergence of ebooks change the importance of cover design? A whole hell of a lot. iBooks and Kindle can emulate bookshelves all they want, but you can’t pretend that scrolling through a virtual library comes close to the blend of mystery and purpose that overtakes you while wandering through a bookstore or library. In the tactile world people, especially the aesthetically-minded ones, really do evaluate books by their covers (would it be such a cliche otherwise?) and are more likely to pick up interesting-looking or well-designed books than ones that look like they were designed in MS Paint by a demented raccoon. The whole buying process is very different for ebooks, I think, which reflects the culture of online shopping in general. When you’re looking for a book online I think you’re more likely to have a specific one in mind, and you probably don’t care as much what the cover looks like since you won’t be toting the thing around and being judged by people on the subway. The same debate is going on about album art in the music industry and I think in terms of design concepts it boils down to the simplification of design so that it still ‘reads’ well on a smaller scale, as icons when you’re scrolling through your library on your phone. There’s no point in intricacy if no one can tell what’s going on, or if no one will even notice in the first place. Ideally, a cover should ‘read’ well on both the small scale and as a tactile object. My two favorite book designers working these days are Matt Dorfman and Jon Gray/Gray318. You’ll probably recognize Gray’s work from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book covers–they’re simple and very striking and I love the way that he uses type as both a design element and as illustration. Matt Dorfman’s work is wickedly clever. A lot of his designs seem to play with the idea of duality, and the ways that two ideas can at once merge and yet be incompatible. You’ll do a lot of double-takes while looking through his portfolio, and you’ll be annoyed at how smart he is. Before closing up, I’d also like to point out a few covers featuring artwork in the more traditional sense. Book design represents one of my favorite intersections of good illustration and good design–you can have one or the other, but when used in tandem the two produce incredible results. 01. Christopher Isherwood – Mr. Norris Changes Trains, illustrated by Vania Zouravliov: this cover is absolutely gorgeous, and to me it implies a lot of crumbling decadence and uncertainty. I haven’t even read this yet (see, uncertainty), and I really did pick it up because I liked the cover. (And because I liked the film version of one of Isherwood’s other novels, A Single Man.)

02. C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters, illustrated by Bill Papas: I’m not at all ashamed to say that I enjoyed the illustrations more than the text. It takes a lot of practice to make your linework look this uncontrolled.

03. Evelyn Waugh – Decline & Fall, illustrated by Bill Brown: In typical Evelyn Waugh fashion, Decline & Fall is full of nonsense and ridiculous characters, but it’s all tinged with a little bit of darkness. And then something terrible happens but it’s still pretty funny because of the context and his writing style, and then it all ends on a really weird and bleak note. The art is ‘fun’, but something about the linework implies a brittleness and fragility that reflects the darker tones of the novel.

In the next installments of Judge a Book By Its Cover, we’ll be inviting other artists and designers to come in and talk about their work, processes, and inspirations. Please get in touch with our editors at editors@writersbloq.com if you’re a graphic designer/artist and interested in contributing. Stay tuned.