I find the design process really interesting, maybe more than the finished work.
Why? (just my point of view) Because during that collaborative process between designer & (ideally) author is where the visual personality of the book will be defined.

PART I: The Book Cover

We get the manuscript for the design of the book cover, layout & website for A Worthy Legacy by author Tomi Akinyanmi.

A Worthy Legacy is a story about life and the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. The author combines the last wise words of her beloved grandfather together, along with a few of her own thoughts to create a compelling story about real life.

Read the manuscript

From just a glance, the overall feel of the book should come out.

Then look for the voice: my starting point for every book is the belief that authors write books because they have something to say. By reading a manuscript, I need to find what it is that they had to say, who says it, how it is said, & from which point of view.

Sooner or later (usually very soon) some details are revealed, and often I find in those little details the key to the cover.

Reading A Worthy Legacy I learned that the author, originally from Nigeria now living in the U.S., tells many insights about the Yoruba Tribe, which totally fascinated me… & gave the book the ‘unique’ factor.
So from the reading I jump to images: search for the graphic elements – images, textures, color palette, etc – that relate to the book:

From there I get the first round of covers to send to the author, and since the first cover was my favorite, I’ve done also an option in a lighter color. Maybe I was trying to persuade? :)

Part II: The author’s feedback & second round of covers.

*The miscellanea on the side of this post is from the font Wingdings2 designed in 1992 by Bigelow & Holmes for Microsoft.

We were recently notified by someone that about a dozen of our book cover designs were being used by a book cover design firm in India. That was surprising news to us. I quickly contacted the company in India and demanded an explanation.

The Indian company promptly responded that the designs were provided to them by one of their designers. The manager of the company apologized, removed our book cover designs from their portfolio, and stated that the designer would be “punished”. Considering their quick response to this matter and their explanation I’ve decided not to link to that company or print their name in this post. Should I?

An odd aspect to this situation is that the firm didn’t include the stolen designs directly in their online portfolio but only in an e-mail to potential clients and labeled the designs as their extended portfolio. So, if someone had not notified us by e-mail then we would have never learned about this incident. I’m trying to have good faith in believing that the Indian firm actually did remove the cover designs and not just changed the location to a URL I do not know about.

Ultimately, it’s quite foolish for a designer to use another designer’s portfolio. What happens when the design thief cannot deliver the same quality of designs as presented in the portfolio?

It’s very common for book cover designers to be influenced by the covers of other designers. It’s something else to blatantly use another’s portfolio as one’s own.

A number of blogs have talked about Picador’s new plans to release literary fiction only in paperback, bypassing the “prestige” of hardcover. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of that Guardian story was the quote, “It is not uncommon for a literary fiction hardback to sell under 100 copies.”

I didn’t think much about Picador’s new publishing plans until I was browsing the bookstores on Avenida Santa Fe this weekend and noticed that Coetzee’s latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, is already out in the stores here in Buenos Aires and in paperback.

Most literary fiction in Argentina already debuts in soft cover. I assume that’s true for all the Spanish-language market. No one here seems to mind and the price is certainly lower than a hardcover equivalent. Essentially, in the Buenos Aires bookstores you only see literary hardcover for collector editions.

Prices for one reason

Diario de un Mal Año retails in Buenos Aires for 35 pesos, which is just over $11 US dollars. In the UK the hard cover is £16.99 and in the U.S. the book is a whopping $25.95! (And in the U.S. the novel isn’t even published yet).

Sometimes I complain about the price of books in Buenos Aires but in comparison 35 pesos is a great deal. But, hey, since Coetzee (one of my favorite authors) writes in English I’m going to wait for the English version, which will arrive with UK pricing converted to pesos – sigh.

But if publishers and readers of Spanish can deal with literary fiction coming out only in softcover, then why can’t UK and US publishers and readers?

Uh, about that cover

In another view to this topic: publishers of books in Spanish save a lot of money by ripping off cover designs from the UK. (Note that this Spanish edition of Coetzee is published by Mondadori, the huge Italian publisher.) Here’s the Spanish version:

Compare that to the UK version:

Now, compare that to the U.S. version, which is quite different and we find quite lovely.

We like the UK version but prefer the U.S. version. The Spanish version is just an embarrassment, though it’s much better than a lot of book covers I see on the shelves of Buenos Aires bookstores. Note even the poor use of type in the Spanish version when compared to the UK version. Of course, it’s likely that Mondadori paid very little for the Spanish cover, probably 1/10 of the design fee charged for either the U.S or UK covers. For Spanish-language publishers, cover design is just not important – unfortunately.

We’ve been busy designing book covers the past few months. The online portfolio has been updated and we’ve also created a PDF portfolio for download.

As a book designer I rarely get to do CD covers but last week I got to do one: Temple Bahan Band.

For me the process was almost the same as for books, just with some different details: I decided to play the CD’s music while working. I have to say that it was different, while listening to the music I tried to think of images and finally more than just images, what I found through the music were layers: different layers with the various voices & instruments that I translated into colors, images, swirls, shapes, and different levels of transparency & this is how I came to design the first mock-ups.

The publisher’s feedback was that they wanted to add some city/party/celebration/ritual themes to the images so from that I worked on it graphically: the old wall texture in the background, the Hindu god, the crowd, some flowers related to Hindu rituals…and here’s the new covers, that yes, the publisher liked.