AS A BOOK DESIGNER, I BELIEVE I HAVE THE BEST JOB ON EARTH. I love books. I enjoy reading. I love the feeling of the images coming out of my mind while reading a book that I will design. I love the process of the words entering the thought stream, turning on the machine and getting the book translated into images, colors, letterforms.
A few weeks ago we got the manuscript to design the book cover & page layout of The Imperfect Enjoyment: A Bachelor’s Memoir by Dewan W. Gibson. That title lends itself to so many design possibilities.
I printed the manuscript and after non-stop reading & laughing for hours at Dewan’s adventures, I came up with a cover. I actually came up with several more but in the end Dewan chose that first one. Here you see the cover and the spine:
The design of the book cover
The thought that led to the cover was ‘what is an imperfection?‘: maybe something that looks perfect but it is not. At a glance, getting “I’m perfect” instead of “imperfect” is itself an imperfection.
The idea of something sexual behind the title relates to the book and is kind of like a ‘peep show’ as a metaphor for the memoir: the people by reading it are ‘peeping’ into the author’s life.
Last but not least, the typography: I chose Emigre’s Brothers because it has that reminiscence of typical college fonts (where a lot of the action takes place in the book) but it is quite more daring & works great to give that feel of excess that I was looking for.
*The word-logo on the side of this post is from the font Brothers Word Logos by Emigre
I like the Imperfect cover, except (for some visceral reason) the slanted “The”.
I am excited to read this book…Dewan’s a great person and author, and I’m confident this book will be the first of many bestsellers to come!!!!
I first read: I’m the perfect enjoyment… Then I saw that it’s The (im) perfect enjoyment. Nice though.
Yes Dan, that’s the point! (the play on words)
nice. The play on words is good, though I’m not sure it is read that way because of the severe emphasis. Nice one.
when will the imperfect enjoyment be released and where can i buy it
@ Ian, of course, you read it the way it was intended to be read.
That IS the design, and the emphasis is the resource used to get there.
@ Sally, I’ll ask for the info and post it.
Dewan is one of my best friends (yeah, I’m already name dropping alredy) and i am confident this would be a great read and make a great gift. he’s worked extremely hard on this piece of literature, and i’m damn excited to read it this winter.
I particulary admire the suggestive and scantily clad cover that this extraordinary author has gone with. As a married man, I look forward to living vicariously through the storis of the auther as he sews his wild oats – I hope no detail is left untold! I look forward to this great read – I can’t wait to get my hands on this jone!
I like the cover a lot and having read the book it is a very fun read. If you want to get a copy of the book i got mine on Amazon.
keep up the good work. (author + book designer)
[...] an earlier post I mentioned using the font Brothers for the cover. So when working on the layout, the idea was [...]