MikeLiveira's Space: Book design

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Anna Blundy Series

Anna Blundy Series:

Final Covers:

Working Sketches:

Anna Blundy Series
Designer: Helen Crawford, White Crush Design
Illustrator: Helen Crawford, White Crush Design
Publisher: Little Brown Book Group, Sphere
Typefaces: Custom Illustrated
Specials: Matte coating and a spot UV on the illustrations

This is a stunning and unique series of covers. These pieces
become even more intriguing when we understand Helen's creative
thought process. Thanks Helen!
—Charles Brock

The Anna Blundy books focus around the character Faith Zanetti, a sassy female war correspondent heroine, that through the series travels the world and gets herself in lots of tricky fixes. The main aim for the covers was to convey the sense of humour of the main character, as well as her femininity and her feistiness with the aspects of politics, travel and adventure. To achieve this, we initially thought we could focus each cover around the country it was based in. For example, use skylines or landmarks to position the books and get an element of the heroine as well. We were able to develop this idea so that the final series was a bit more subtle. For example, in the Neat Vodka cover, the country reference is Russia, hence the babushka doll. The vodka swilling, cigarette smoking Faith is shown through the fag hanging out of the doll's mouth. Similar references are made on the other covers; a lighter with the Italian flag on it (Milan) and a cocktail stirrer with a pharaoh's head on it (Cairo). The covers were all developed from the initial Russian doll design, which was something that I thought instinctively would make a striking image that could appeal to a predominantly female audience.

Once the cover route had been decided on, there was a clear and uncomplicated working process to the final series. Although the designers at Little Brown nearly went for a different patterned cover with illustrations by Corinna Radcliffe.

The illustrations for these covers were done in-house at Crush and all the type on the cover, including quotes is hand drawn or handwritten. The colour palette is dramatic and helps emphasize the thriller side of the books whilst remaining fun and female.

An Object of Beauty

An Object of Beauty
Author: Steve Martin
Illustrator/Designer: Darren Booth
Art Director: Anne Twomey
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Typeface: hand drawn
Specials: The illustrated lettering was hit with an ultra high gloss and the paper stock emulated canvas texture. The thinking behind that was so it would actually feel like a piece of artwork.

Steve Martin has some nice book covers, but this one is my favorite by far. The book title is also the perfect description of the books design. An Object of Beauty. Thank you to Darren for all his help and patience.
—Charles Brock

How did you become a book cover designer/illustrator?
I'm an illustrator and letterer and graduated from Sheridan Institute's Illustration program back in 2001. Although I'm not a designer per say,
I get opportunities to design and art direct, and when given them, I take
them. Lately, I've been getting more opportunities to be a part of the
overall design process. I'm not exactly sure why that is happening,
but I'm not complaining.

What do you enjoy about your job?
I enjoy almost everything about my job except for writing estimates.
Each part of the job has it's own challenges that I enjoy and I'm grateful
to have known at an early age what my career was going to be. I'd be
lost without it.

Were there any steps taken before starting, and was there a clear working process that led to the final? Any known influences?
The Creative Director, Anne Twomey, mentioned in one of early conversations, that Steve Martin enjoyed the work of Ed Ruscha and
I kept that in mind when developing different approaches. Anne gave
me an incredible amount of freedom to "do my thing" but the one constraint was to ensure the artwork didn't appropriate any one artist, it needed
to have it's own identity. Ruscha's work gave me the idea to keep it simple and graphic. I've personally always enjoyed Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly's work because there's often a lot going in small areas, which gave me the inspiration for some of the textures. My process is pretty much the same with every project I do—it's something I trust and have confidence in,
it starts on paper and ends on paper and there's very little computer involved. Once upon a time I would cut and paste my sketches until they were ready for final. Nowadays that's where the computer does a bit of the work as it makes more sense to just cut and paste in Photoshop until the elements
are in their right place.

Via Darren's blog.

What was the message behind the design? And what's something unique you learned while working on this project?
There's beauty in imperfections. The fact that the lettering is done by hand allows for that feeling of a human element to come across. In some of the letters, there's intentional and unintentional mistakes and that's one of the things I like about the design.

On this project, I learned how to incorporate and juggle the differences between inspiration and influence. I knew what the differences were, but I needed to employ both of these things to personally consider the design a success. Normally I don't try to be influenced by something, I just try to stick to inspiration as it helps to create originality. To me, the simplicity of the lettering is influenced by Ruscha's work because without it, there would have been no design or approach. Inspiration on the other hand, came from Rauschenberg and Twombly's work because even if I didn't use them to pull from, the backbone of the piece would still be there, it would just have a different color palette or different textures. I found it difficult to juggle those two things because so much of a creative's work is done intuitively so when you have to be conscious of certain constraints, whether they're imposed by
a client or self-imposed, it tends to create challenges that need to be met.

Thoughts from art director Anne Twomey
An Object of Beauty is a novel of an ambitious young woman set in Manhattan's high powered Art World during it's heady days of the early 1990's till now. It is also a history of modern art. The stated challenge was getting a cover for a celebrity author done and approved in little over a month. The unsaid challenges were that the finished book needed to be
as distinctive and beautiful as a piece of art itself.

With a strong title and beloved author, a text driven solution, seemed obvious. The author and I were both fans of Ed Ruscha's textual flat paintings and most periods of modern painting. I spent and afternoon at MOMA looking at several other pop artist: Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauchenberg, and Jasper Johns all who had incorprated painted text to their work. My objective was to create a cover that emulated text driven art, without being derivitive of any one artist.

My first concept called for the cover lettering to be stencil die-cut, allowing for a painting on the book case to be revealed. However, production proved to be too complicated. Next was an attempt to make the title look like a painted canvas. I even thought of attempting to paint it myself. Thankfully, Darren Booth's masterfully illustrated type, had been on my radar. I hired him to do sketches and was thrilled with what I saw so he went to final quickly.

I envisioned a cover stock that emulated canvas. Much research was done to find a canvas stock that came in a version that looked like primed or unprimed canvas. Testing was done, particularly for the binding process as this plastic stock, typically used on book cases, had never been used as a book jacket before. Finally, Darren's painted lettering was hit with an ultra high gloss lamination that emulated an oil painting's linseed oil.

For the end papers, the only direction I gave Darren was to paint something inspired by Abstract Expressionism or Color Field painting.

The interior of the book, called for 4/c prints throughout. These prints of art work, follow the narrative of the book as opposed to being relgated to a central 4/c signature.

Steve Martin, publisher, editor, and agent were thilled with the final book and cover. The book was well publicized and went on to be a New York Times Bestseller and hit every national bestselling list.

An Object of Beauty has been featured on numerous television shows including The Late Show with David Letterman, Live! with Regis and Kelly, and The Colbert Report.

An Object of Beauty is in the AIGA Archives for 50 Books/50 Covers of 2010.

More work by Darren Booth.

Please visit Darren's website to see even more of his work.

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Solo

Solo
Author: Rana Dasgupta
Designer/Illustrator: Heads of State
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Typeface: The cover face is a found typeface scanned from an old spec book and then redrawn.
Printing Specs: Nothing special with the printing however the cover stock is a nice dull stock that really compliments the cover aesthetic.

fpo
—Charles Brock

How did you become a book cover designer? What do you enjoy about your job?
We found our way to book cover design through poster design and
editorial illustration. Book covers are sort of close cousins to posters, especially illustrative posters. Designing covers is always a big honor
and an even bigger challenge. We're both avid readers, so seeing
our work wrapped around a bound book is always quite a kick. But it's
a unpredictable challenge. Digging in and finding the right cover for a
story is a different errand every time and that is what makes it terrifying
and exciting..

What is Solo about?
The story is told partially from the perspective of a 100 year old man on his deathbed who recollects the pieces of his life as seen through the events of the 20th century. Did I mention he is also blind and Romanian? It's kind of like Murakami meets Garcia Marquez, Ionesco, and Terry Gilliam. Sort of.

Were there any steps taken before starting, and was there a clear working process that led to the final? Any known influences?
The story was too grandiose to be specific. We tried a lot of different imagery as symbolism for the main character. Eyeglasses. Soviet-era housing structures with many, many windows. In the end, we felt the solitary figure dissipating seemed to speak volumes on it's own. It had the right feel. It started out as a sketch that we actually passed on. But as our first few rounds of comps failed to resonate, we went back to our sketchbooks and found this idea. This is a big part of our process. We're always diving back into notes and doodles to see if we missed something interesting.

What was the message behind the design? And what's something unique you learned while working on this project?
With the scope of the story being so broad it was hard to sum it all up in one image but we feel the birds represent both the entirety of the character's life as well as his memories. A parrot also plays into the story so there is a literal nod as well.

When you have a story with such a broad range with some many aspects that a person can get latched on to, we feel it's best to approach in in a more general manner. Simplicity can be an evocative device.

When all else fails, go back over your thoughts and ideas. In this instance
we went through a number of rounds and nothing seemed to work. We started paging back through sketch books and stumbled on a little tertiary sketch that never made it past this kind of after thought, didn't even make
it into our internal crop of potential covers. But after all the dust settles
that little spec of a sketch really encapsulated the story.

Solo is in the AIGA Archives.

More work by The Heads of State.
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Check out their website to see even more work.