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The primary tool of a book cover designer is Adobe Illustrator, but sometimes the design for a book starts best by hand.
Notice the yerba mate to the left (in the top image), just above the jar of ink and plumin: a telltale sign of the Argentine book cover designer at work.
A future post will show the full color concept that arose from this preliminary book cover design.
The end of year approaches, bringing that time to reflect on what it’s all about.
It’s easy to let the production aspects of any job overwhelm your daily work, whether it’s the deadline of completing tasks to deliver a book on time, mastering a particularly challenging feature of InDesign, selecting the best typeface for a specific project, or devising an attractive layout that presents the information on the page in an engaging manner. These are all elements that comprise the day-to-day occupation of a book designer.
Ultimately, our greatest satisfaction in designing books doesn’t come from any one activity. It’s all about the whole thing: the book, obviously. But it’s not about holding the book in our hands, viewing our design. For us, it’s all about providing the author with a superbly designed book, a book that the author loves, a book that brings the author’s vision and words to life on the page.
We’re thankful to our great clients who give us the opportunity everyday to design books.
Working with self-publishers & small presses is a wonderful thing: they are dedicated to each project & open to new ideas. The work turns into a very collaborative process and I can offer new approaches to the book design.
This is a project we’re about to finish for a new customer, a small publisher: a poetry book for children.
Poems are very delicate creatures, and normally I wouldn’t dare manipulate the layout of poetry. However, the client specifically requested a book designer’s approach for the typography and layout.
By reading the poems I realized that each one had its own individual identity within the whole group of poems. I thought it would be interesting to bring out the story of each poem by using the typography to reinforce that unique character or situation.
I envisioned a book that the reader would find engaging & attractive to the eye. So, I mixed text and illustration by allowing the lettering to form parts of the illustration.
One of the reasons I started looking for alternatives to the more traditional approach was that the publisher wanted her target audience to be children from 6 to 12 years old. Six-year-olds need bigger font than 12-year-olds. Using different font sizes throughout the book opens the book to a broader audience, whereas setting all the text in one size would target a more specific age group.
Since the book will be printed in black ink only, a few pages with black background sprinkled throughout the book is a good option for breaking the black on white (caution! you need to discuss this option with your printer).
A great book that we designed last year is Ed Wolkis’ How to Take Photos That Move Houses. This full color book represents an example of the complex challenges in book design. Ceci is going to have a very in-depth post on the book design issues for this title. Meanwhile, head over to the book’s website and take a look at some sample pages from the book.
BTW, this book is not just for real estate professionals. It’s a fantastic book on photography for anyone.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is coming up next month and one our clients, Ellen Bryson, will have her debut novel promoted at the fair.
Ceci did the illustrations for the novel (and, yes, it’s adult literary fiction with illustrations). We’re also in the processing of building Ellen’s website. Her novel will be released by Henry Holt in the summer of 2010. I’m going to have more posts about the developing of Ellen’s author website, but for now you can look at the preview page at ellenbryson.com.
Publishers Weekly has a great list of books promoted by publishers and literary agencies at this year’s fair. Here’s the brief on Ellen Bryson’s novel:
On the adult fiction front, Foundry has the debut novel The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson (Holt, 2010); set in 1865 New York, the book follows the titular character—he performs as the “living skeleton” in P.T. Barnum’s American museum—whose life is changed after being hired by Barnum to be the showman’s personal detective.
